@richpuchalsky @PhoenixSerenity In part the problem is that internet infrastructure has been invested in and managed in a centralized way for so long that it takes significant investment of resources and time to develop any reasonable alternative that is trustless and decentralized.

That, and for many more specific tasks the issue is just plainly more difficult to do in a decentralized manner. You end up needing to create and use CRDTs, a data archetype that is not at all a solved problem and still heavily worked on. Yet little adopted, since the incentive structure behind the economics prioritizes centralized infrastructure so that it can be held hostage for a price.

In this context there becomes little a lone or few developers can reasonably do, especially between their dayjobs. Which means it ends up for most, centralized infrastructure or no solution. No solution means surrendering the masses to predatory platforms that are full of *only* capitalistic authoritarian bastards, instead of the relatively few in contrast.

@richpuchalsky @PhoenixSerenity And I would certainly agree with that critique. There are also a number of ways that this capacity can be significantly reduced on the infrastructure side.

If identities and account content were managed in a decentralized manner, on-device, the ability of instance owners would be significant reduced. If you take this far enough, they'd have almost no power. See: DeltaChat, which is a good example of a communication platform/medium that offers very little power to the instance/relay holders. They basically have none and cannot practically do much at all.

The problem I have, then, is that your understanding of hosting a mastodon instance as "inherently suspicious" is so out of sorts with the observable incentive structures at play, as I see them, as to actually weaken your critique.

@richpuchalsky On the note of group policies; those are certainly most ideal, but many people often find themselves with not many other people they know with the same passion and drive to start such a project. Frequently none.

I myself host a nextcloud for several groups as its lone administrator. And not out of choice. I've been looking for someone to share the load (and also balance against my power, I dont like having unilateral control over so much.). The people I serve are not technically literate, and so dont know how to vet people for this or even why I find it so important. It's frustrating.

The problem is: coordination, collaboration? It's hard. And it's especially hard in a society that conditions people to be infantilized by tech. But it is so very very important.

However if you mix the strain of hosting the project on top of it... it becomes even more unreasonable to expect a robust group with guidelines and policies AND the solution instead of just some random person doing it in their free time as basically a hobby.

It's such a pervasive problem, the lack of material incentive but surplus of unreasonable drive, related to the software and tech community as a whole that it's a frequent meme: https://xkcd.com/2347/

@richpuchalsky I genuinely don't know what else to tell you, since I have no idea where so much of your cynicism comes from. I host lots of software for local communities, clubs, I interact on the daily with mutual aid groups. I have a very active ring of friends and contacts who regularly host mastodon servers, unix servers, voip servers, for them and their friends.

It is often a thankless task, with little to be gained, as you mentioned outright. It is hilariously and ironically (given that it is, sadly, a male-dominated field) at times invisible labor. You face harassment even by your own users. It can be awful.

It is also often fun, and a mentally engaging process akin to a puzzle. You learn a lot and grow. You feel capable. When it grows, and is up and running, you feel accomplished. Perhaps you might understand it more from this angle; that it is often a kind of hobbyist drive behind a lot of it.

I certainly wouldn't go through the bs if I didn't have any fun.

But yes, there are capacities for abuse that attract some amount of, whatever you'd like to call them; narcissists, megalomaniacs, self-interested assholes. This is why I prefer relay-based, trustless(ish, it's complicated) solutions since they make that capacity almost null in most circumstances.

Part of it, though, is that there's not much to be gained for these assholes compared to other, easier, and less authoritarian-hostile spaces.

So I can't tell where you get this cynical and sweeping generalization on the motivations at large. It is certainly in direct contrast to my very personal experience of myself and others. I am also not aware of any empirical studies. So as far as I can tell, you're reasoning mostly off a limited handful of examples and your very uncharitable view of the culture of these spaces.

@richpuchalsky this is a shockingly cynical way to view it. Like holy shit I have no idea how you could possibly reach this conclusion.

I don't know what circles you frequent to give you this kind of impression, but the technically literate people I surround myself with do it as a mutual aid kind of thing most of the time. Usually out of an abundance of caution or concern about the intentions and integrity of *other* people hosting servers, such that their local community (usually and especially their immediate friends) can feel safer or more welcome. This is the primary and most immediately identifiable motivation I can find anywhere.

Beyond the fact that, though seemingly this escapes you, a lot of people find doing this hard thing of creating and managing a service for people... fun? People may surprise you.

The world can be an evil, awful place, but I think it may be worthwhile to you to analyze how the lack of benefits to hosting a mastodon server may actually lead to *more credible people* by volume than the circumstance in which there was some cynical, material advantage.