Mastodon’s eternal September begins?

https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/

by robin_reala • 4 years ago

242 304 4 years ago

rapsey3• 4 years ago

These exoduses 9 times out of 10 only create some insular single topic community. For people who want to participate in an echo chamber.

Anyone who thinks Mastodon has any hope of being the next Twitter is delusional. It is the next Parler/Rumble.

ggm3• 4 years ago

Maybe the best next twitter is not to BE the next twitter?

I mean seriously, what if twitter turned out to be a bad idea?

We haven't had "the next 8 track" or "the next Zoetrope" or "the next cutlass" -We do other things instead.

Maybe a hyperfocal single issue social construct, is what trainspotters actually WANT?

rapsey3• 4 years ago

That is what I said. It is for people who want an echo chamber.

I mean seriously, what if twitter turned out to be a bad idea?

Twitter fills a void where there is no real alternative. How can it be a bad idea? If you are morally opposed to it or something don't use it.

rippercushions• 4 years ago

Parler/Rumble were very clearly designed for exactly one single topic, MAGA.

The interesting thing about Mastodon is that it has the potential to host countless single topic communities, similar to Reddit.

mrlatinos• 4 years ago

The problem is I have no idea how to find them, so it seems more like IRC.

paulgb2• 4 years ago

Mastadon doesn’t ever need to become the twitter of 2022, and most people would rather it didn’t. It does remind me of Twitter in ~2008, which is arguably more fun anyway.

(Anybody who thought 2008 twitter would become what it is now would also have been called delusional)

rakoo• 4 years ago

Mastodon absolutely doesn't want to be the next twitter. It is antithetical with the spirit of the creator and the community.

If an actor wants to hyper centralize its users, bets are other platforms won't federate with it

ilyt• 4 years ago

I think they're being overly optimistic here. This will only keep up if musky boi truly sinks twitter, but if all he does is kicks out the "trendsetting"(lmao) "moderation" and actually enforce their own TOS I think twitter will be just fine

blitzar3• 4 years ago

What happened to absolute free speech?

fragmede• 4 years ago

Elon got made fun of (impersonated), and decided that was his limit on what constitutes "free speech".

sinity6• 4 years ago

He seemingly backtracked on the claims it will be "letter of the law". He confirmed that he will keep moderation of "hate speech" and so on.

But then, his enemies also flip their position all the time, synchronized to always be against what he's doing lol.

Ofc _somehow_ moderating "hate speech" and so on is still not enough. Unclear why.

mikro2nd2• 4 years ago

I think what will sink Twitter will be if Mr Musk goes ahead with his plan (as he's stated) to have "blue tick" tweets all float to the top while deprecating tweets from non-paying users. In my world $8/month seems an outrageous amount for the privilege of bloviating into the void, yet if I don't see my own comments and those of my other non-paying friends, what the hell is the point of even being on the platform?

cbeach• 4 years ago

I think the $8/month charge will put spam and bots out of business. That’s why Musk is doing it.

I’ve just subscribed to Twitter Blue and aside from the extra features, I have a lot of confidence that if others do this, we’ll have a more robust and civil platform.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

$8/month sounds cheap for an actual, continuing verification of identity. The proposal that blue checks be an indication of some sort of process rather than a gift handed to powerusers is nothing but egalitarian.

If you and your non-paying friends are commenting on each other's tweets, I don't know how oppressed you would be by blue checks floating to the top of threads. Are there tons of blue checks in your threads now?

In case somebody needs an existence proof, I'd prefer blue checks rising to the top. It would cut down on 99% of abuse if 20x<firstname><bunchofnumbers> couldn't get anywhere near the top of the thread. If blue checks also got the ability to prioritize the the people they follow (or a separate priority reply list, rather than using their follows), we might see some civilized discussion without all the brownshirt disruption.

This would absolutely panic the administration, and the intelligence and military communities, though (and probably a lot of PR agencies) so I don't see it happening.

bhoops• 4 years ago

Mastodon could go either way, but i think as an experiment its sufficiently differentiated to warrant a rethink on how social media should be. Only a couple of years back Mastodon UX was too poor to be usable, but it has grown leaps and bounds now.

Mastodon might not be the next twitter, but maybe it has already succeeded as a refuge for people not wanting to be on twitter. The bigger problem mastodon has is that its servers are running full to take on new people.

We have been running a few instances of mastodon which now have more space for new users. Link in my bio if anyone wants to use them, but might run out anytime.

robin_reala• 4 years ago

It’s worth checking if your instance accepts donations to defray running costs. E.g. mastodon.social gets funding from the Mastodon Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

Shoue• 4 years ago

There are also interesting instances like social.coop that are run like a cooperative – you join and are expected to donate monthly, as little as $1, and in return you get democratic control over the instance. It can be a cool incentive to "donate"/invest in the instance.

UncleEntity• 4 years ago

Only a couple of years back Mastodon UX was too poor to be usable, but it has grown leaps and bounds now.

I see strong parallels between this and blender when I was active in the community around a decade ago.

Everyone nowadays takes blender seriously as a contender in that market now so keep the faith, peeps.

blowski15• 4 years ago

Twitter’s model is between an individual and their followers, which is bad for organisations because the individual leaves and takes the followers with them.

Mastodon allows companies to own those relationships on their server.

For example, I can have the BBC Mastodon server, and all the accounts are @bbc. If the employee leaves, they lose the account. The BBC can do their own moderation, but still be connected. Smaller organisations can do to the same for customer support. They can own the advertising and the UI. And if Mastodon goes weird, they can take their URL with them. They can add their own plugins rather than being dependent on the API.

I think this is a big reason why Mastodon is getting attention, rather than simply being an alternative place for cool kids to hang out.

paulgb2• 4 years ago

I agree that this is an eventuality, but is anyone actually doing it yet? Everyone I’ve known who has migrated has either been to community-run or self-hosted instances, and I haven’t encountered any corporate or university domains when lurking around.

blowski15• 4 years ago

No, I haven't seen anyone doing it yet. I might just be voicing some wishful thoughts.

tpm• 4 years ago

One often mentioned example is the EU. https://social.network.europa.eu/about/more

One swallow does not make the summer though, as we say in our country, so we'll se if there will be more.

Edit: there is also on for the German Federal Government. https://social.bund.de/about

amadeuspagel2• 4 years ago

This is exactly why people love twitter. They care about individuals, not organizations. Individuals tweet, and usually are not paid to tweet. (Nor would any organization want to be associated with any fleeting thought that an employee has.) And what's fun about twitter is precisely that it's a neutral ground where everyone, from every organization, dukes it out.

Of course, this model is possible in the fediverse as well, just as it's possible with email. (And note that many people prefer a gmail address to one that they'll lose when they get fired.)

blowski15• 4 years ago

This is exactly why people love twitter. They care about individuals, not organizations.

Sweeping generalisation. Some people care about some individuals more than the organisation to which they belong. Think Trump funs who would vote for Trump whichever party he stood for, or Tucker Carlson fans who would watch him on any network, or Tom Brady fans who would follow him whichever team he played for.

But for every Trump, Carlson or Brady, there's a 1000 Liz Trusses or Huw Edwards, in whom most interest is solely because of the organisation to which they belong.

And there's no reason an individual can't have both an organisation account and a personal one. Even aggregate accounts which pull everything together. Mastodon offers a lot of opportunities to do things differently.

vvillena• 4 years ago

Individuals tweet, and usually are not paid to tweet.

Tweeter is the poster child of personal branding. A near totality of the high-visibility posts are transactional in nature. The posts are either crafted by PR people, meaning someone got literally paid to tweet, or are done personally with the aim of increasing personal branding or as part of a contract.

blitzar3• 4 years ago

Half formed thought ... however.

I am more than just my job (or hobby, or location) - say I am a worker and have my @work, and I am deep into digital art so I am also on @mastodon.art.

I should really only talk with my work hat on @work and my art hat on @mastodon.art - should these be able to be optionally linked. Should the follwers of me @work also see my @hobby etc without having to follow me all over the federated universe?

Movie star X on twitter will promote their new movie, talk about their kids, pump and dump crypto, slag off a politician, rip the latest death etc. All one the same 'instance' or server.

blowski15• 4 years ago

Maybe both? With a meta account that aggregates from all your other accounts.

If the BBC are giving you a megaphone, it's useful that they can take away that megaphone when you leave. You can always choose to speak without the megaphone.

nirimda4• 4 years ago

I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees. I understand it can be particular bad for women and minority journalists, because some people will make sexualised or sexists and racist comments in response to an article the truth of which they cannot contest, but the existence of which they abhor - in order to discourage such journalists from writing on this topic.

Does the federated model deal with that? I understood that the owner of an instance can moderate any posts that come from that instance, whereas the only moderation you can do of external instances is to ignore the whole thing. That would mean a BBC journalist could neither hear legitimate criticism from positive participants, nor harassment from negative participants. And anyone on that second host would continue to see the harassment, and it might simply have its chilling effect on the next generation.

I think the interest of journalism companies in having their own instance would only be met if they could moderate replies and mentions no matter where they're from. In such a world, perhaps the user could say, "Please ignore moderation from these instances" - so that you could continue to see a post on a third-party instance excluded by the BBC if you didn't trust their moderation.

Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way federation with trusted third parties, who they could trust to moderate extensively. It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft tend to look askance at any email not sent from the servers of one of them. (If the trusted third party instances allow federation, it might be much more interactive than email is.)

A final possibility would be that the BBC and other major content producers would treat Mastodon as "write-only", in much the same way that Reddit links to content and people discuss it, but generally the major media companies ignore it.

blowski15• 4 years ago

I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees

That's certainly one issue, but there are many others. Owning your own Mastodon server should make it easier to find a solution compared to having to use Twitter's tools.

It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft

There are more trusted email servers than just those two. Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind. Albeit that's not the perfectly distributed model, I would rather an oligopoly like that than just Twitter.

Highlighting ways in which Mastodon is not utopia isn't a valid reason to stick with what we've got.

ekidd2• 4 years ago

Does the federated model deal with that? I understood that the owner of an instance can moderate any posts that come from that instance, whereas the only moderation you can do of external instances is to ignore the whole thing.

Mastodon has a lot of tools for muting and ignoring, both at the account and at the instance level. Here are the admin-level tools: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/

Right now, it looks like admins can "suspend" or "silence" external instances as a whole, but not individual users. "Silence" is interesting, because it's essentially a "soft ban": Users from that server will only appear to local users who follow them, if understand correctly. It's essentially, "Mostly we don't want to hear from @wretchedhiveofscumandvillany.example.com, but some of our users want to follow specific people from there, and that's cool."

Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way federation with trusted third parties, who they could trust to moderate extensively.

This is already true to a certain extent. It appears that instances that won't moderate especially abusive users may gradually be defederated from other servers (or at least silenced). And of course, individual users can also ignore entire instances.

supportlocal4h• 4 years ago

A company like the BBC can post content to their own website completely under their own control. They can build their own platform that completely controls commenting. They can pay a large staff to build and maintain that platform exactly as they see fit. So why do they need Twitter?

Seriously, what is the value of Twitter for them? It isn't the same as for the masses who need somebody else to build and maintain all that infrastructure. For entities capable of running their own networks, Twitter and TikTok and all the other "social media" serve a different function. Indeed, when you are not only capable of running your own datacenters but actually do run them and operate your own media network, but still include Instagram as a core component of your business strategy, it is because it provides a value you aren't realizing from everything within your own datacenter.

sinity6• 4 years ago

I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees.

They certainly don't want the responsibility of moderating themselves. That's why comment sections disappeared, probably. There's a nice theory about that in: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...

"We Need To Have A National Conversation About Why We Can No Longer Have A National Conversation"

It’s the story of everyone who’s tried to host a space for political discussion on the Internet. Take the New York Times, in particular their article 'Why No Comments? It’s A Matter Of Resources'. Translated from corporate-speak, it basically says that unmoderated comment sections had too many “trolls”, so they decided to switch to moderated comment sections only, but they don’t have enough resources to moderate any controversial articles, so commenting on controversial articles is banned.
And it’s not just the New York Times. In the past five years, CNN, NPR, The Atlantic, Vice, Bloomberg, Motherboard, and almost every other major news source has closed their comments – usually accompanied by weird corporate-speak about how “because we really value conversations, we are closing our comment section forever effective immediately”.
This confused me until I had my own experience with the Culture War thread.
The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did.
But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons.
Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are. Each of these views has, at times, won over entire cultures so completely that disagreeing with them then was as unthinkable as agreeing with them is today. I disagree with most of them but don’t want to be too harsh on any of them. Reasoning correctly about these things is excruciatingly hard, trusting consensus opinion would have led you horrifyingly wrong throughout most of the past, and other options, if they exist, are obscure and full of pitfalls.
I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas. But none of those luminaries had to deal with online comment sections.
The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time.
“So they should deal with it! That’s the bargain they made when deciding to host the national conversation!”
No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action.
Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.

thinkingemote• 4 years ago

The federation aspect is the most interesting to me and has the most potential but it also the least important to most users. So much so because moderation issues, computing power and maintenance and simple powerful network effects all point to centralisation.

That's what we are seeing, people are choosing one thing not a federation of things.

There needs to be some reason and big benefit that people get for choosing federation. The only thing I can see would be if there's some kind of major and controversial moderation defederation event (e.g. a cancel culture controversy) but very soon before people get entrenched in their patterns and can see why federations are useful.

Possibly then, having instances run by media organisations might actually show the difference in moderations in the fediverse.

ignaloidas5• 4 years ago

Out of the things you listed, moderation is for sure one that gets harder to deal with the more centralized the network becomes. All large instances have comparatively bad moderation, and that's a fairly well known fact among the older users.

For what it's worth, moderation is the best thing about fediverse. So many communities that have grown up there over the years couldn't have done it without decentralized moderation.

And it's not like there hasn't been a "some kind of major and controversial moderation defederation event" - there have been several. There are several collections of instances that are fairly closed off from the wider network. And honestly, that's fine. If some people get tired of others shit, they should be able to close themselves off from them.

The simple fact that a single administrator can moderate an instance of about 100 active people in their free time is what allows the moderation in fediverse to scale. Adding more people makes it a job, and from what I've read from professional moderators of social networks, that job is not a nice one.

blowski15• 4 years ago

Sure, people have been choosing that approach for the last 10 years. But there's no law baked into the universe that says it will be ever thus.

telmo4• 4 years ago

I love the idea of Mastodon and I would love for things like that to take us back to the less centralized and less corporate internet of before, but I am pessimistic that it will happen anytime soon.

The real reason why people are "migrating" to Mastodon right now (and can't seem to stop talking about it on Twitter) is one and one only: to signal their tribal affiliation. Twitter used to be controlled by the blue tribe and now it was bought by a member of the red tribe. That is all that is happening. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don't know if Elon Musk will destroy Twitter or if it won't matter in the long term. I suspect the latter, but I'm close to 50/50 on that. What I am sure is that the average Twitter user will not actually stay and use Mastodon right now. Most people are on Twitter for the audience and/or to follow those with large audiences, and Mastodon does not have that not will it in the near future (which makes it sound like a really nice place to hang out now that I mention it :)

I would also point out that, in my experience, internet communities are great until they get noticed by the mainstream. Once they become mainstream, they attract huge masses of users that want to fight for their political tribe with high hostility / low creativity content, and the eye of Sauron (politicians in general) falls upon it, and opinion piece writers start fanning the flames of moral panics, and the good times are over.

ignaloidas5• 4 years ago

Oh, these tribal migrations have happened before. Most people indeed leave, but some do actually find that they like it more each time such a wave happens.

Fediverse is in the best sense of the word, weird. You have to embrace the weirdness to understand it. Not everyone can, or will. It would take a lot of time for that weirdness to be ironed out so that most people would be comfortable using it, but I don't think many in the community developing it are interested in that.

blowski15• 4 years ago

The real reason why people are "migrating" to Mastodon right now is one and one only: to signal their tribal affiliation

That's an assertion. I've moved because I genuinely want to own my network and not get suddenly blocked, losing access to everything. And I've moved because I want to encourage others to move. If everybody else moves, then it becomes easier for me to remain moved, and thus promoting it on Twitter is entirely consistent with that goal.

ElevenLathe• 4 years ago

The real reason why people are "migrating" to Mastodon right now (and can't seem to stop talking about it on Twitter) is one and one only: to signal their tribal affiliation.

Having a Twitter account is largely also about this. There is a "Twitter Tribe", and people feel it deeply as part of their identity. This is why there is so much emotion around the Musk acquisition.

r00fus2• 4 years ago

Twitter used to be controlled by the blue tribe and now it was bought by a member of the red tribe.

This is so reductionist. Elon advocating for team red is one thing, him introducing a rootkit into Twitter (blue/verification without any actual validation of identity) and laying off half the employees to defray Twitter's leveraged buyout fees incurred by the buyout is yet another.

People are leaving because they're losing confidence he has a plan that isn't lighting the place on fire. In fact, DMs between Jack and Elon indicate that was entirely the plan - to promote Jack's BlueSky venture.

ekidd2• 4 years ago

If the employee leaves, they lose the account.

The Mastodon software actually allows moving an account between instances fairly easily, though it requires cooperation from both the source and the dest instance. When you move an account, you keep all your followers and everyone you follow. But your old posts stay on your old server.

I do agree that it probably makes sense for big organizations to have official instances, however.

asdff2• 4 years ago

It's no different than email, though? If you sign off all your blog posts with your BBC email address, and you leave BBC and no longer have email access and can no longer log into your blog or wherever else you have grown dependent on that address for, then you are rightly an idiot for putting all these eggs in a basket you don't own. No one says we have to reengineer the email protocol, they just say to have an email address you control.

elliotpage• 4 years ago

This post is fascinating- it uses "I" and "We" so interchangeably that it is almost dizzying.

I want to ask them: what do you want? If you run your own Mastodon server you have a large degree of control over how that is run and federates, so can customise your experience. To continue the analogy, you can stop people invading your house party.

Then there is the cultural lamentation and the "no-one asked if I wanted that" line, which is wild because cross-posting has been around for as long as there have been platforms. It just happens.

mangecoeur• 4 years ago

I felt this as well - ok so this person feels a bit 'assaulted' by the sudden surge on incoming people... but it seems bit silly to create open instances and then be shocked when people actually want to join them, especially when mastodon (AFAIU) makes it relatively easy to create private spaces if that's what you prefer.

As for cross posting - re posting and re-mixing other people's content has been pretty much the basis of the internet since forever. Again, if this is something you're not happy with you should better create private forums for just your friends, that's a totally fine thing to do. Much like if you want an intimate house party you only invite your friends and eject any gatecrashers who try to sneak in.

Perhaps the clue is in the 'anarchism' bit - in anarchist circles when you have a smallish and relatively close group you can manage a very positive and supportive atmosphere without rules and protocols. But as things grow you lose that, inevitably, as having more people means needing more formalized ways of handling issues. I can see how it feels like losing something but on the other hand you have to question the wisdom of an approach that is basically guaranteed to fall apart as soon as it becomes a bit popular.

pmw• 4 years ago

in anarchist circles when you have a smallish and relatively close group you can manage a very positive and supportive atmosphere without rules and protocols. But as things grow you lose that, inevitably, as having more people means needing more formalized ways of handling issues.

This is eloquently explained in The Tyranny of Structurelessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

recuter• 4 years ago

  I've been thinking of metaphors to try to understand why I've found it so upsetting. This is supposed to be what we wanted, right? Yet it feels like something else. Like when you're sitting in a quiet carriage softly chatting with a couple of friends and then an entire platform of football fans get on at Jolimont Station after their team lost.

  *They* don't usually catch trains and don't know the protocol. They assume everyone on the train was at the game or at least follows football. They crowd the doors and complain about the seat configuration. It's not entirely the Twitter people's fault. They've been taught to behave in certain ways.

It ain't their fault its the way they were brought up.

I/We/Gaia would like those gross football fans to not exist on their planet. There is only I/We/Gaia. Not asking what Gaia wants is bad. There is only I/We/Gaia. (https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Gaia)

  I struggled to understand what I was feeling, or the word to describe it. I finally realised on Monday that the word I was looking for was "traumatic".

  Suddenly having hundreds of people asking (or not) to join those conversations without having acclimatised themselves to the social norms felt like a violation, an assault. I know I'm not the only one who felt like this. The tools, protocols and culture of the fediverse were built by trans and queer feminists. Those people had already started to feel sidelined from their own project when people like me started turning up a few year ago.

There is only I/We/Gaia.

colinsane2• 4 years ago

cross-posting has been around for as long as there have been platforms. It just happens.

there’s a range between “something i posted to my public newsletter/blog” and “encrypted signal chat message”. for most people, crossposting is OK in the former, but a clear norms violation in the latter. ultimately, this can only be enforced culturally — and yet most of us still expect that as viable: “it just happens” is the thinking of a selfish CEO who does something blatantly unethical and defends himself by claiming “but i didn’t technically break the law!”

Mastodon is somewhere on this scale — and quite likely at least slightly closer to the chat end of that scale than twitter is, taken in whole. it also has features to signal what is appropriate (e.g. it’s more of a violation to cross-post something with a lock icon next to it than with an unlock icon than with a globe icon). but new users aren’t likely to have a strong understanding of this visibility setting, so it’s even more the case that a norm violation might be obvious to one section of the userbase while the (unacquainted) norm violator is completely unaware.

yeah, defederating is a solution. in a similar sense that getting a restraining order is a solution to IRL disagreements. it’s more pleasant for everyone if you can reach shared norms and only deploy the stronger tools against those who actually mean you harm.

jefftk9• 4 years ago

Mastodon is somewhere on this scale — and quite likely at least slightly closer to the chat end of that scale than twitter is

Even for public posts? Which show up in the federated timeline for thousands of people you don't know, are visible to anyone who loads your profile, and can be shared by URL? To me that sounds very close to a blog post (no need to ask for permission to share) and not much like a direct message (definitely ask first).

ignaloidas5• 4 years ago

The amount of users joining the network daily already started to drop. I see no Eternal September actually happening if the trend continues. I'd give a week for that.

throwaway0x7E62• 4 years ago

the people fleeing twitter over Musk's dedication to the freedom of speech will find themselves at home at mastadon, where problematic instances are defederated from - sometimes for as little as refusing to ban a particular problematic individual, and where developers are bullied into blacklisting those in their apps.

even late pre-Musk twitter was far more tolerant than mastadon. for example, any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network, I guarantee you that.

mike_d• 4 years ago

any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network

If you are getting defederated by 90% of the network, isn't that maybe a strong indication that 90% don't want to hear what you have to say?

Freedom of speech is a protection against the government censoring you. It doesn't mean you get to spread hate and toxicity freely without consequence.

throwaway0x7E62• 4 years ago

yea, that's what I'm saying - mastodon is the perfect fit for those people, so this is not an Eternal September kind of event.

paul_funyun2• 4 years ago

No, it indicates only that the administrators of 90% of the network don't want others to hear what you have to say. If the admins don't want to hear you they'd use the block function.

fleddr5• 4 years ago

Let's say that you're right, and that 90% of Mastodon instances would want to block the Harry Potter lady. This isn't really true, they're pressured into doing this by ruthless activists, but let's pretend that the blockage is genuine and voluntary.

If that is true, it means Mastodon misaligns with probably some 90% of the political spectrum that would absolutely not want to take away her speech, regardless of whether people agree with her.

Which means...Mastodon is a far-left echo chamber. Which doesn't have to be bad, everybody deserves to have their place. I'm just saying it's not suitable for mainstream usage.

Double_a_922• 4 years ago

If it gained traction amongst the "general public" such niche ban reasons would probbaly become less common. And neutral federations would automatically emerge because at some point not every instance will bother to ban other random instances.

easrng4• 4 years ago

Refusing to ban queerphobic/antisemitic/racist users is by no means a niche reason for defederation.

josteink• 4 years ago

any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network, I guarantee you that.

That sounds crazy. If my instance did that, I would immediately consider moving to another, more politically tolerant instance or just run my own to traverse the censorship issue entirely.

And the good thing about the fediverse is that a user has those options and isn’t at mercy of other peoples limited tolerance for freedom of speech.

pimterry2• 4 years ago

even late pre-Musk twitter was far more tolerant than mastadon. for example, any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network, I guarantee you that.

As a user of the network in general though, this doesn't have to matter to you. You can sign up on an instance that defederates according to whichever rules you like (or on an instance that defederates nobody at all). You can still talk to the rest of the network just fine, in addition to talking to anybody other instances want to defederate. There's no silo, you don't have to pick a side.

You can even self-host your own single-user instance (or rent one, from e.g. https://masto.host/, although they've closed signups due to demand right now) and control federation directly. With that, the only people you won't be able to talk to are people & instances that decide to block you _personally_.

tomlockwood• 4 years ago

Musk's dedication to the freedom of speech

In his first letter to staff he said they need to focus on "banning trolls". Oof ow.

amadeuspagel2• 4 years ago

People whining about some Eternal September always remind me of people who moved to a city last year whining about newcomers. The internet is not usenet. You can have your own website (or mastodon server) and make it invite only. But a lot of us prefer "cities", not "villages"—or gated communities. And it seems to me that a lot of people like the city at some point and then want it to remain static and closed. When the fact that it is open is the only reason they were able to move there in the first place.

repler• 4 years ago

It’s like when my toddler tells me I’m not playing with his toys right.

“You’re using it differently than I like to use it!”

dsr_2• 4 years ago

Now imagine the toddler is part of a collective that has carefully built planes, mills, lathes, sanders and lumber-handling machinery to produce wooden toys and has been giving them away for free and sometimes accepting donations.

Oh, and they aren't a toddler, they're adults.

Oh, and they aren't your kids, either. Not related to you at all.

Now your analogy is much more useful.

sph• 4 years ago

I think the hate for the Eternal September these days it's misplaced. It's not "noobs" and average Joes that have ruined social media/the Internet, it's companies and businesses.

It's because of them the Internet has become a sanitised, soulless, for-profit space. If Mastodon succeeds, companies will open their profiles on there, and watch how Mastodon will start to wither and die.

Just wait for the first "<big multinational company> has opened their own Mastodon instance" post in the near future.

matthews2• 4 years ago

Just wait for the first "<big multinational company> has opened their own Mastodon instance" post in the near future.

The EU have had a Mastodon instance[0] before it was cool! (Although, it isn't open to the public and only has a few EU agencies as members.)

[0] https://social.network.europa.eu/about

throw0101c2• 4 years ago

It's not "noobs" and average Joes that have ruined social media/the Internet, it's companies and businesses.

¿Por qué no los dos?

amelius• 4 years ago

Just wait for the first "<big multinational company> has opened their own Mastodon instance" post in the near future.

Yes it will become like email where you can't really run your own server unless you want to spend the rest of your time fighting to get off corporate blacklists.

ManuelKiessling• 4 years ago

My pet theory is that it's both: I can imagine that the "classical Internet" with everyone on-line could be quite awesome, and the Internet of today with only "pre-September" folks on-line could be quite awesome, too - but everyone online in the "big multinationals" Internet is not much fun.

Zak2• 4 years ago

A few (or even many) companies creating accounts or servers with which to promote their products or services does not strike me as an existential threat to Mastodon, the ActivityPub network, or the wider Fediverse. People don't have to follow or interact with them. Users can block accounts or domains. Server admins can block other servers.

I do see other dangers though. Here are a couple bad scenarios I don't think there are adequate safeguards to handle gracefully:

Spammers, trolls, Nazis, etc... buy domains and spin up servers in an automated manner for the sole purpose of abuse. We saw that with email and while most of us get fairly little spam now it still isn't solved. To make matters worse, it's hard for anyone with a new email server to deliver to the existing big ones.

A VC-backed startup and/or existing big tech company decides to embrace, extend, and extinguish the protocol.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 4 years ago

The September That Never Ended was the worst thing that ever happened to The Internet.

The September That Never Ended was the best thing that ever happened to The Internet.

Yeah, it brought all those obnoxious tourists, with their Hawai'ian shirts, straw hats, loud voices, and trash.

But they also brought money. Lots of money.

That's when this whole "make lots of money in tech" thing started.

Should be an interesting story.

mcv4• 4 years ago

And that money lead to Big Tech and walled gardens.

I do miss the internet of the 1990s, but we can never go back there. What we can do, though, is fight for more open platforms.

selfhoster11• 4 years ago

Screw that money. I’d rather have the old Internet vibe back.

noobermin• 4 years ago

I was about to post the same thing, this essentially is nimbyism and exclusivity. It's even worse as you say because unlike twitter, you can easily set up a private server and you never have to interact with the unwashed hordes again.

duxup2• 4 years ago

I'm old enough now that I've seen three or four waves of people moving into various neighborhoods, each and every one bemoaning the next wave and how terrible they were ... just like the folks they displaced (granted I say displaced indicating the typical movement of people, nothing forced).

fleddr5• 4 years ago

Yep. It will be hilarious to see once Gen Z owns homes. Watch attitudes change.

qikInNdOutReply3• 4 years ago

Unpopular, there will be that "one" server, offering the same services twitter does, where everyone flocks to, breaking the concept of the federated servers, because the audience wants one public plaza.

blowski15• 4 years ago

Are you telling me that's an unpopular opinion? If so, I'm downvoting because I always downvote people who "predict" the popularity of their comment.

qikInNdOutReply3• 4 years ago

Its unpopular in the "going against the narrative of dezentralisation that spawned the platform" way, as its human nature to have social places to gossip like a village plaza, church or in this case, many servers. Likely outcome is thus, one official battlefield of opinion, and some smaller echo chamber servers depending on political leanings.

Karsteski• 4 years ago

Honestly same, I do not understand why people start their comments like that... Just say what you have to say

s3000• 4 years ago

If Twitter had prepared an ActivityPub bridge and would activate it tomorrow, would Twitter remain the dominant player? Could they even expand their network to rival Youtube and Facebook?

perlgeek• 4 years ago

y'know, this would be the opportunity for Google to gain some clout in the social network world.

Start up a hosted mastodon instance, make a bit of fuzz and PR around it, and then over time invest some resources into making it more awesome. All for relatively little effort, compared to starting a new social network from scratch. The largest effort would likely go into moderation on that instance.

Who else could do that? Maybe New York Times? Apple? It needs to be someone with an established brand, and the engineering skills to run it at scale.

(Disclaimer: not my own idea, heard it somewhere else -- maybe on risky.biz?)

dmitriid• 4 years ago

Google bought Orkut. Shut it down

Google had Google Wave. Shut it down

Google had Google Plus. Shut it down.

...

If Google unveiled a Mastodon instance tomorrow, why would people believe that Google had any interest in developing and maintaining a social network

blowski15• 4 years ago

Indeed, this sounds like the very definition of "out of the frying pan into the fire".

emptyparadise• 4 years ago

I remember what Google did to XMPP with Google Talk.

jefftk9• 4 years ago

It wouldn't be anywhere near that simple:

* If there are security vulnerabilities in Mastodon and Google is hosting an instance then Google would be blamed, which means they would need to do a very thorough security review before hosting one.

* If they announced it and lots of people wanted to join it would probably have far more members than the biggest Mastodon instances do today, so they would want to make sure they had something that could scale horizontally. I don't think the current codebase can do that?

* There are various places where the current design of Mastodon doesn't match user expectations around privacy and control over their content. For example, if you delete something it looks to you like it's deleted but that delete may not fully propagate. By hosting a server Google would be taking responsibility for this, and would have people mad at them (likely with lawsuits) when it didn't do what they expected.

This isn't to say that Google would never get into the federated social network space, but it would be after building their own activity pub implementation.

(Disclosure: I used to work at Google)

NoboruWataya• 4 years ago

The author is very quick to call Eternal September. It is entirely possible that a few months from now this will have turned out to be a flash in the pan.

More broadly though, I thought the main USP of Mastodon was that, if you don't like the toxic behaviour of a group of users, you don't have to endure it? Why then would this influx be an issue for anyone?

The post also seems very dramatic, bordering on hysterical, in the way it describes how "upsetting" it is that other people are joining Mastodon and the "grief" that has apparently struck the extant community there. Which, ironically, strikes me as very "Twitter" behaviour.

fleddr5• 4 years ago

It's an escalation of Twitter's micro aggressions into Mastodon nano aggressions.

When I hear the word "trauma", I'm thinking of veterans, people that lost loved ones, victims of violence.

On Mastodon, trauma refers to getting too many follow requests.

poulpy123• 4 years ago

I'm ready to bet you that most new people will not stay on mastodon because it lacks all what made twitter successful

philliphaydon• 4 years ago

Honestly I don’t think mastodon will ever grow. The vast majority of Twitter users don’t even know what it is. And those moving will eventually begin to fall behind and miss out on what’s happening and ever silly end up on both platforms or just gravitate back to Twitter.

95% of those I follow are tech and prob about 10 are on mastodon and Twitter and no ones really talking about it.

The average user who is following a bunch of celebrities isn’t going to move because 1 celebrity moved. They prob won’t even notice the celeb moved.

_ph_• 4 years ago

This depends on several factors. First of all, whether there is a Twitter in a few months. Elon might have fired too many people responsible for critical parts of the system, there might be a technical collapse.

Even if not, we will have to see how the dynamics of Twitter evolve. Yes, if Twitter can survive on people following celebrities, then it might survive anyway. But currently, Twitter is seen as a reputable place to be for all kind of organizations. Media, the government, sports teams. Everyone is on Twitter. I am trying not to judge Elons ideas at the current state of things, but trust is difficult to obtain, but easy to lose.

Currently, we do see quite a trend for "tech" people to at least also use Mastodon if not outright to migrate. This is quite an important user group. We will see, how many others might follow.

berkes5• 4 years ago

It has grown beyond six million users. How is that "will [not] ever grow"?

Mastodon doesn't need to follow the "rules" of big tech, or corporations. Mastodon is a success the moment two people can successfully communicate with it. Or six million. Nothing else matters. There's no difference.

There are no shareholders that want to see increasing MAUs. There are no investors that want to exit and therefore insist on ballooning the numbers. There are no employees that will loose their jobs when growth lags, nor advertisers that want to get ever more eyeballs else they leave for [other corp].

It really doesn't matter what any of those fictional "average users" does: whether they follow, stay, go back, whatever: as long as the people using mastodon now have a good time, and get value today, its a huge success. There honestly isn't anything else needed.

redshark03• 4 years ago

I dont think it will catch on, I have seen this exact mass exodus on bitcoin twitter to bitcoinhackers.org, it never stays active, after a few weeks/months everyone is back on twitter.

xurukefi3• 4 years ago

It's absolutely beyond me how people believed (or still believe) that Mastodon will be a replacement for Twitter. That's a level of delusion I will never get behind.

pimterry2• 4 years ago

For me, it's largely replaced Twitter already.

I mainly used Twitter to see what was going on in tech & open-source and discuss development topics, and comfortably 50% of the tech people I followed on Twitter have now set up on Mastodon, either additionally (cross-posting to both) or in quite a few cases as a full replacement. I post the same thing to both and I get far more responses & engagement on Mastodon now. For me personally it _has_ replaced Twitter.

Depends which circles you move in and what you use Twitter for (it's certainly not useful in the politics & journalism scene yet, for starters) but there's already significant movement here in some areas.

previnder• 4 years ago

You are like 1% of the 1% of the 1% of internet users. Most people have never heard of Mastodon, and even if they had, they'd find it hella confusing because there's no mastodon.com that they can go and sign up.

This is the single greatest barrier to entry that's not going to go away without compromising the ideals of federation.

xurukefi3• 4 years ago

I'm talking about mainstream adoption. Mastodon is never going to be anything more than a niche phenomenon. Similar to how odysee is never going to be the next YouTube, which is even more ridiculous that people believed that.

If you want the masses you need a "classic" setup: big commercial company, lots of money and a centralized infrastructure.

foul• 4 years ago

Eternal september is a problem if you depend from someone else for your fediverse instance. If you rely on your own server, you have an atom button for blocking traffic from selected instances at least at firewall level. It is not usenet or "social network du jour" anymore if you put some effort or cash. A decentralized cyber environment is hard for building stardom status and for making money, if you have both of those probably it has no effect be it positive or negative.

dools• 4 years ago

Perhaps Hugh can draw on the timeless wisdom of Snoop Dogg in these trying times:

Now that I got me some Seagram's gin Everybody's got their cup but they ain't chipped in Now this types of shit happens all the time You gotta get yours before I gotta get mine

jefftk9• 4 years ago

I don't really understand the author's sharing preferences. They're upset that people didn't ask them for their consent before sharing a link to their post, but I'm having trouble telling what the norm is. Should people be asking before boosting (retweeting) posts? Writing blog posts replying to our referring to them?

The internet norms I'm used to have public posts as available for that sort of response: if you shared it to the general world and it has a URL that anyone can load then it's fine to link to and discuss. If Mastodon has a different norm here then (a) that's going to be a hard lift because it is so different from the rest of the internet and (b) I wish people would make it clearer what the norm they're going for is!

foobarbecue4• 4 years ago

Was it a link? The text read to me as if it was a screenshot, but I don't actually know.

jefftk9• 4 years ago

I read it as both, one person doing each: Early this week, I realised that some people had cross-posted my Mastodon post into Twitter. Someone else had posted a screenshot of it on Twitter.

I understand being unhappy about screenshot sharing, but my read is that even if only the link sharing piece had happened they would still be upset?

duxup2• 4 years ago

I don’t think “ corporate publishing systems steer people's behaviour” to …. share things they find interesting.

I think that’s just a human thing.

A lot of what is described here just seems like human behavior, and I do not understand the authors description of it as “a violation, an assault”.

There’s a weird glorification of the current participants of the fediverse in that article and yet outright rejection of anyone new, and by the description of the article no interest in welcoming them.

xg153• 4 years ago

I think the real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community is that, should Mastodon really become the "next Twitter", it will catch the attention of the other FAANGs. And the way the Fediverse is structured currently, it appears highly vulnerable to the old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish playbook:

1) Establish a corporate Mastodon server and deeply embed it into your existing platform. ("We love the Fediverse! We love it so much that we've built native support for it into Google mail. That's right! Starting tomorrow, every @gmail address is also a valid Mastodon user! No need to sign up anywhere, you can just follow and toot and boost right from your Gmail app!")

1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1]

2) Bombard the community with proprietary extensions and attempt to take control of the technical standards. ("We love ActivityPub too! That's why we're planning to add YouTube integration to it! And Google Calendar invites! And Maps locations and advanced emotes and and and... Developers of servers and third-party clients are encouraged to follow our new ActivityPub Extensions living standard. Feedback is encouraged!")

2a) Non-FAANG server admins or client devs now have the choice between continuously playing catch-up on technical features they have to implement or tolerate that a large part of messages become incomprehensible to non-FAANG users.

3) Pull up the drawbridges. ("While ActivityPub is great, we feel that ultimately it limits the platform's potential and does not meet our standards for privacy and security. Therefore, ActivityPub will be sunset at the end of the year for @gmail.com. Third-party clients and servers are invited to implement our web API instead. Just register your server as an app in the API console and apply for a key...")

I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.

[1] https://financesonline.com/number-of-active-gmail-users/

andridk• 4 years ago

XMPP :'(

lupire• 4 years ago

The kids today don't know that their futurology is actually history.

anthk• 4 years ago

That's for private IM save channels, Mastodon and all of the Activity Pub it's for public showcasing.

berkes5• 4 years ago

While I love XMPP, it suffered from being just too early. And therefore lacking crucial features like e2e encryption, voice, video, etc. All of those are "possible" but all as afterthought, plugin or bolted on. Never a natural part of the core.

squarefoot• 4 years ago

Please don't give ideas to the enemy:)

Anyway, could they trademark the Mastodon name and logo, so that a 3rd party partially incompatible client should be forced to identify itself as something else avoiding confusion? This would bring the next question: can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?

coldacid3• 4 years ago

can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?

Yes, you can always defederate from other instances if you want. In fact, a lot of fediverse instances do just that to protect their hugboxes from the rest of us who actually value our ability to communicate with each other. And there are certainly a number of instances that defederate from others on technical grounds rather than social ones.

coldacid3• 4 years ago

I would expect that Google would quickly get the Gab treatment if they decided to go fedi (that is, everyone preemptively blocks/defederates from them before they even have AP support enabled).

opan• 4 years ago

Pixiv already did the first thing, All pixiv users have a Pawoo mastodon handle. I think it helped bring a lot more Japanese people to fedi.

astrange2• 4 years ago

Pixiv doesn't own them anymore so not sure if that still happens, but I do know Japanese users can't reach a lot of the rest of the universe because admins like randomly blocking their entire servers.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1589188383376834560

croisillon• 4 years ago

I love how you wrote the corporate blogs, it sounds so real!

FlyingSnake• 4 years ago

This sounded like a script of Black mirror, corporate edition.

r00fus2• 4 years ago

That's because it's actually not-so-distant history (e.g.: Microsoft)

rolenthedeep3• 4 years ago

While this is an entirely plausible (even likely) idea, I don't think it would play out that way. Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. In this scenario, Google will be defederated from the rest of the network, along with all their users.

Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer.

I think the core culture of the fediverse is sufficiently anti-corporation that it will be extremely difficult for someone like Google to corrupt it.

jefftk9• 4 years ago

some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer

The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing".

I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%...

thomastjeffery3• 4 years ago

The core culture? Did you even read the headline?

Eternal September

And this time, we're talking about billions of new voices. Forget about core culture: that's gone now.

Ygg2• 4 years ago

Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit.

Replace Fediverse with email. And it would still stand.

Then realize where email is today. Two-three email providers and hosting your own email server grows less and less plausible each day.

sigstoat• 4 years ago

Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit.

sure, but it's being loaded up with piles of users who were perfectly happy with corporate bullshit two weeks ago. you're not going to make cultural converts of them before some bright eyed product manager at google spots this opportunity.

in fact, you'll probably _never_ convert them. they'll probably convert the rest of the place. hence "eternal september".

tensor• 4 years ago

And this in a nutshell is why Mastodon will always be niche and will never be a twitter replacement. Indexing every post is good and would be a solution to one of the biggest problems with Mastodon: discovering people to follow.

As it currently stands Mastodon is a very toxic community of people in the sense that they don't care at all about what the average person actually wants or needs in a network like this. Any and all complaints or comments pointing out the problems with usability are met with exactly the sort of hostility you describe here.

Hell, even as a very technical person I can't find anyone to follow on Mastodon other than developers. There was some large index of the most popular mastodon servers so I tried that and the top entry in the health category was an antivaxer spreading misinformation.

Honestly what we need is a twitter replacement, centralized, with search and recommendations. Perhaps run by a non-profit council or something.

Cyberdog3• 4 years ago

Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer.

Kinda puzzled by this. Who's out there posting to the open Fediverse with no expectation that their posts are going to be seen, indexed, and possibly archived? It's like publishing a web page and expecting that search engines won't index it.

Just like with other services, you should expect that anything you post to the Fediverse will be there forever, tucked away in databases, indexed by search engines, and outlive you. Even more so, since editing or deleting Fediverse posts is more like a polite request than an actual command; some servers ignore such requests even if your home server complied.

That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings.

aidenn03• 4 years ago

The danger isn't fediverse defederating with Google, it's Google defederating with the fediverse.

Look at what happened to jabber/gtalk...

pasquinelli• 4 years ago

Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit.

will it continue to be?

rodgerd• 4 years ago

Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit.

You might have said the same thing about HTML, once.

Now it's whatever the owner of the browser monopoly says that it is.

YetAnotherNick3• 4 years ago

for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit

That will entirely work in favour of big companies. If there was a split and only one split is capable of serving 100 million users that split will win.

Adrock• 4 years ago

Yes! This is why counterantidisintermediation [1] needs to be deeply considered in social systems design.

I really enjoyed Dmytri Kleiner’s "You can't code away their wealth" talk [2] introducing the concept.

[1] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g

LesZedCB• 4 years ago

this is really interesting thanks for the links! venture communism isn't an idea i've come across and i'm intrigued. i dont think capitalism can abide being bought out and transferred by a bunch of anti-capitalist actors but its a new project and that's good!

rusk• 4 years ago

Really interesting thanks!

shortformblog• 4 years ago

This is 100% what Substack is doing to email newsletters right now. It doesn’t look exactly the same, and they’re not doing it with technical standards but with additional features, but the framework is very similar. They’re on step 2.

acheron• 4 years ago

You can just say "Google". I don't think Netflix or Amazon are going to be trying to take over any kind of social network.

berkes5• 4 years ago

I wouldn't be suprised to see ActivityFlow™ or such at AWS, some PAAS activity-pub server that can be connected to lambda, kinesis, etc etc to "add your product to the fediverse - infinately scalable (€0.002 per in- or outbox activity)".

Naturally, that would be a proprietary service. Or a service lifted off github and extended - the patches never streaming back upstream.

cf• 4 years ago

This is kinda what happened with Mastodon wrt to ActivityPub. Lots of what the Fediverse means is how Mastodon chooses to use the protocols. Often in ways that aren't even compliant with the specifications. So yep EEE is highly viable as an attack.

ignoramous3• 4 years ago

1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1]

Imo, that's a W for Mastodon, not a L.

I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.

That's exactly what happened with email, but haven't folks at Matrix/Elemental built a nice playbook to tackle this? Mastodon can and should be its own company. Today, it largely remains a work of just one eng, and incredibly so!

Vinnl5• 4 years ago

Wait, what's Matrix's countermeasure to this? That sounds interesting.

FormerBandmate• 4 years ago

Truth Social, one of the biggest private Twitter competitors with 4 million users (although obviously not appealing to Muskfugees because it’s essentially a playground for Trump and his supporters), is literally just a Mastodon instance with federation removed. It’s already happening

djvdq2• 4 years ago

IIRC the same situation is with Gab

MR4D• 4 years ago

While I believe you are mostly correct, a technology that allows for competition is better than one that does not (eg TWTR,FB)

Edit added: email is an example. Pain in the butt to not be on MSFT, GOOG, etc but at least it’s possible.

xnx• 4 years ago

Everyone pointing out the examples to email are exactly right. If Google hadn't botched the Buzz launch, this would've been a perfect time to introduce it.

derangedHorse• 4 years ago

This is a valid use case for a corporate instance of a server. If a big corporation did invite a mass of users to the platform, it would still be a win for the platform in my book. The platform itself doesn't specify any restrictions on big servers just because the owners of these big servers are bringing in new users that they have influence over. Deeming a valid utilization of a platform as a 'real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community' misses the point.

mattbrewsbytes• 4 years ago

Do you mean for private internal communications? Like as a slack replacement?

JustSomeNobody• 4 years ago

Okay, but hasn't Mastodon (users) actually been wanting it to grow? I see people on HN, reddit, etc. all the time promoting the use of Mastodon. You cannot have it both ways. You either want your favorite platform to be popular and used or you don't.

tinalumfoil• 4 years ago

Twitter encourages a very extractive attitude from everyone it touches.

Twitter gives people the means to express the attitude they already have. "Influencer Culture" didn't start or end on Twitter.

I've been on Mastadon for about a year now, on a small instance that's not accepting new users, and my experience has been great and hasn't changed. If you want to be inclusive and accepting of new users that's great, but that also means accepting their ideas and who they are.

djha-skin• 4 years ago

The people re-publishing my Mastodon posts on Twitter didn't think to ask whether I was ok with them doing that.

The OP lost me here. You posted your opinion to the public internet. Whether or not you didn't think your audience would reshare using the platform, they could have shared it in a myriad of ways, including posting it to sites like this one. It's even harder to moderate how your opinion gets spread around on the fediverse than on Twitter, where blocking and takedowns are possible. That's sort of the point of the fediverse.

justsomehnguy2• 4 years ago

In the footer of the site:

> All content © Hugh Rundle except as noted in Acknowledgements. Text licensed CC-BY 4.0.
> Please ensure any redistribution adheres to the Creative Commons Best Practices for Attribution.

jefftk9• 4 years ago

That seems completely compatible with sharing a link, which was one of the things the author objected to?

(I agree with them in not liking screenshot-sharing culture)

Zak2• 4 years ago

That appears to be true for the https://hughrundle.net website. It would be unreasonable for the author to complain about consent for people sharing his blog posts anywhere after publishing a public license granting consent to the whole world to do just that (as long as people are following the license).

It does not appear to be true for the https://ausglam.space/@hugh Mastodon account. Copying the Mastodon posts and sharing them on Twitter without permission is a copyright violation, and generally rude.

phoe-krk• 4 years ago

That's sort of the point of the fediverse.

You're mistaking the technical implementation of the Fediverse with the social contract that maintains its existence. The Fediverse is built on the idea of consent, where interacting with you happens because you consent to that interaction happening, and you can withdraw that consent at any time by e.g. deleting your original post. (That's also why the "quote tweet" feature from Twitter is absent on the Fediverse.)

When people and instances don't follow that contract, they simply get defederated.

albrewer• 4 years ago

That doesn't control the existence of screenshots and copy-paste though. Once you have released something to the internet, there's no guarantee it won't be copied and distributed via channels you don't desire.

Cyberdog3• 4 years ago

You're mistaking the technical implementation of the Fediverse with the social contract that maintains its existence.

People are unpredictable. If there are "correct" ways of using the Fediverse, they need to be implemented into the code. Otherwise people can and will use it in whatever ways the code allows.

At any rate, there are many people, myself included, who don't really care if my posts get screenshotted or reposted outside of my server or circle of friends. How is someone supposed to determine to whom to apply this "social contract?"

Again, the default mode of thinking when posting anything to the internet should be "everyone, everywhere, forever into the future, will be able to see this." The Fedi is not immune from this rule.

(That's also why the "quote tweet" feature from Twitter is absent on the Fediverse.)

It's absent from Mastodon. Other front ends support it. Not sure why Mastodon is holding out.

aaravchen2• 4 years ago

Yes, and the social contract is that if you post to the tool which is designed exclusively to broadcast your message publicly, it's ok to broadcast it publicly. If you wanted a social contract of limited visibility, then a tool which includes or supports that would be a good first step.

WorldMaker8• 4 years ago

Mastodon has multiple privacy request levels and there's a "follower's only" level. That may still be seen as "posting to the public internet" but there's a courtesy expected there that's different from "public" posting.

lzooz2• 4 years ago

On Saturday evening I published a post explaining a couple of things about Mastodon's history of dealing with toxic nodes on the network. Then everything went bananas. By 10pm I had locked my account to require followers to be approved

He locked his account AFTER he posted the post.

So yes this rant makes no sense at all.

aaravchen2• 4 years ago

I'd be interested to get a source in that. To my knowledge, the big three pure microblogging stacks, Mastodon, Pleorama, and Soapbox, have no such controls. Everything posted is always fully public, it only limited who gets automatically notified of the new posts under certain conditions ("DM" doesn't notify all followers, but it's still funny visible in feeds). If you're taking about something on Friendica or Hubzilla, you very well could be right, or maybe it's just not a feature I've seen it heard about from anyone before.

fleddr5• 4 years ago

Mastodon will not be the next Twitter, for many reasons.

It doesn't scale. A influx of some tens of thousands of users already breaks half the fediverse. Absorbing this relatively small growth means an instance owner has to reach deeply into their pocket to pay for extra hardware capacity. And sees their manual moderation workload explode. In between this scaling, the system will simply be dysfunctional or locked down. It all runs on donations and volunteer work.

This is much different from Twitter where as a user you're never confronted with scaling or funding problems. Nor would you easily face the situation that all your content is wiped out because the instance owner retired. Or because a mod doesn't like you. Because moderation is completely arbitrary, Reddit-style. An instance owner may also decide to not federate with specific other servers that you liked, destroying your cross-instance posting and following.

You could scale by making lots of instances, but people need to actually fund and run them. And it makes all of the above issues even worse.

The culture clash is perhaps most interesting to see, as the author correctly lays out. The author uses the word "traumatic" when confronted with an abundance of follow requests.

That sentence succinctly summarizes the typical culture. The fact that it's a request, requiring permission. And a type of extreme fragility that is opposite to Twitter's culture.

Although policies vary between instances, most are designed for safety to the point that conversation becomes dysfunctional. One large instance stated to not post food, insects, and a whole list of highly generic items without a content warning (CW). Because apparently, somebody might be triggered by those. A user questioning this policy was soon circled and explained that it only takes seconds to do, whilst the "trauma" lasts for days.

Extreme safety leading to unsafety in expressing the simplest of sentences. It's a clash of two extremes. Extreme toxicity and extreme fragility.

The other limiting factor is the rejection of America's culture war. Don't be political or overly political, and especially not regarding the topics dominating US politics. Here the mismatch cannot be larger. Twitter basically IS the US culture war as of 2016 when Trumpism brought Twitter back from a coma. Twitter users have been exposed to this extreme polarization for 6 years, they've internalized and normalized it. And now they're asked to shut up about it and to not cause any stirs.

The result, a perfectly happy and peaceful place is disturbingly unsatisfactory, I care to admit. Nothing happens. There's no enemy to bash, no drama, nothing to be outraged about. It's like watching the news where the reporter says: all is good today, carry on. Or watching a movie where nothing happens to any character.

How many online "friendships" and communities survive without a common enemy? And if it survives, why use Mastodon, when you might as well open a Reddit community or Discord server?

DoItToMe81• 4 years ago

Mastodon has been mostly filled with either people too disruptive for larger platforms, or obsessives looking to slice off a corner of something greater solely for themselves and people who fit in to their image. I don't see how more people could possibly make it worse at this point.

BonoboIO• 4 years ago

A „ traumatic „ experience, that some people posted a screenshot of his post on twitter.

I think you lost me there.

That made me laugh.

janmarsal• 4 years ago

wishful thinking

asdff2• 4 years ago

Eternal september only becomes bad when corporations start hiring positions to advertise on these new platforms. Otherwise, its an idyllic period of sharing information and cultural development, right up until media sinks their teeth into such a large market of consumer's eyeballs and attempts to shift the point of focus from interesting things that are genuinely interesting to profitable things that are often genuinely harmful, because its infinitely easier and far more profitable to engineer something that is harmful to a degree than to account for all the potential harmful externalities (In biology we see this as well; among symbiotic relationships, parasitic interactions are far more likely to evolve than mutually beneficial interactions that could take millions of years of evolutionary change to emerge in a steady state).

nineteen999• 4 years ago

I don't see Mastodon becoming the next Twitter. It has a marketing problem. Whereas on Twitter one "tweets", what does one do on Mastodon, "masticate"?

I predict a temporary influx of new users, which will leave once they realise that Mastodon is full of shrill geeks. In the interim the shrill geeks will moan that their beloved platform has become overrun with "normies".

I don't use either so have no skin in this game, happy to be proven wrong. Sitting back with a very small bag of popcorn until all the noise blows over.

Crespyl• 4 years ago

what does one do on Mastodon

toot

barbazoo• 4 years ago

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/

You "toot".

not2b3• 4 years ago

It will work out. There's been an initial bad reaction to a few things, like content warnings, but I think most of the new people will adjust. There will be some conflicts, but some features of Mastodon will prevent some of the worst problems with Twitter: the equivalent of "likes" doesn't cause things to spread, there's no quote tweets, and no algorithm trying to pump up the most outrageous content.

If the desired of different people are too incompatible, then some servers may wind up blocking other servers. So be it.

rcarr• 4 years ago

Mastodon is not going to become the next twitter. Based on what I’m seeing it’s going to be substack. They’re gunning hard for twitter atm, they’ve dropped lots of twitter like functionality in the last few days. The authors, thought leaders and journos all love it already because they get more interaction with the audience, they actually get to earn money, it’s easy to use, and everything is centered around longform ideas rather than cheap throwaway comments.

subjectsigma• 4 years ago

Nobody asked me if I wanted to be popular, boo hoo

Holy Lord this kind of stuff is so obnoxious. This is a problem that is fixable with a single button. Make your account private, done. And yet here we are with this absolute yarn about how it's a moral issue that people are using a social network to socially network.

Mastodon’s eternal September begins?

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