Mastodon Sustainability – hosting costs, scaling concerns, and problem users

https://medium.com/@lim_nick/mastodon-systemic-sustainability-afe172699cb2

by lim_nick • 9 years ago

42 10 9 years ago

ahmeni• 9 years ago

It will definitely interesting to see if the $5/registration model will pan out with a newer service as a quality filtration method without a locally established community in place first.

AlexMax• 9 years ago

I think this gives too much credit to blacklist-driven policies and not enough credit to attackers.

Back when IRC was new, open federation between IRC servers was the norm until bad actors forced the networks to only federate with known good actors, and to quarantine parts of the network that still allowed open federation - there is a reason why EFnet was called Eris Free. That was back in the 80's and early 90's. Today, attackers are far more sophisticated, and not even Twitter, who has $$$ to throw at the problem and owns the entire stack, is capable of stemming the tide of bad actors, spam, and fake accounts. Taking money seems like a good idea at first, but then suddenly you have to deal with credit card fraud.

I anticipate that Mastodon will balkanize, ending up with a couple of large networks, IRC-style, that federate only with each other, and have unified, agreed upon set of rules and a super-moderation team that can act on any node. Networks that insist on open federation will lose the battle against the tide of bad actors and will dissolve into anarchy and either shut down or start whitelisting with the rest of them.

I would really like to be convinced otherwise on open federation.

lim_nick• 9 years ago

unfortunately I share your view for the most part, but I'm working to avoid being so fatalist about the outcome here until I see more experimentation

x0x0• 9 years ago

I don't think you can assume Twitter has seriously tried to stop bad actors, etc.

1 - There have been single programmers who built more effective block lists than twitter by doing the obvious thing: walking the graph of harassers and including common accounts;

2 - Twitter seem to be desperate to juice registration and active user accounts, and anything that hurts those is not a priority.

buzzybee• 9 years ago

On the other hand, this is the era where machine learning is supposed to solve every problem, and it has always been applied towards fighting bad actors.

luma• 9 years ago

I love the idea presented here, where there's a low and affordable up-front fee to act as a small speedbump to anyone wishing to spam or otherwise abuse the network. They can register a thousand accounts, but it'll cost them $5000 to do it, and if they're a jerk, the accounts can be yanked. If you think you want back in on the "party" (love the name), you can still do so but it's once again going to cost you.

confounded• 9 years ago

I'd be much more likely to pay if the instance had a different name!

NoGravitas• 9 years ago

Amusingly, capitalism.party has had only 10 signups (and reportedly, poor availability), while anticapitalist.party has around 700 users.

mxuribe• 9 years ago

Whatever reasonably progresses federated social networks - like Gnu Social-based networks like Mastodon - forward sounds good to me!

brian-armstrong• 9 years ago

So, App.net?

Mastodon Sustainability – hosting costs, scaling concerns, and problem users

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