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I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and adminis

I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. > People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. I think people mostly want a smaller power to do it for them, or at least a "smaller than The Platform, or The Government". In the case of Mastodon, I can find a smaller instance with a handful of moderators who I trust, and let them curate that instance. If I later find that they have abused that trust I can disassociate with them and move to a different instance, and all of my contacts or the general public on other instances remain unaffected. If a user doesn't want to go to the effort of finding a specific instance that suits their desires for moderator activity, they can easily set up on one of the biggest instances (much the way one can easily set up a gmail account), while the design of the system still preserves their freedom to move to another instance if they later decide to do so (as I can choose to set up a yahoo or fastmail account, or even run my own server). The basic experience for the average user can be just as moderated (well or poorly, by as many or as few people) as Twitter is, if a big instance chooses to do so, and the freedom of users is still preserved in a way that Twitter or Facebook cannot.

wdewind 8y ago
> I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales. > I think people mostly want a smaller power to do it for them, or at least a "smaller than The Platform, or The Government". People want the freedom of small networks while gaining the moderation protection of larger ones. People's beliefs about this are largely incoherent imo. That being said I'm broadly against heavy handed moderation, and so I'm happy to see it being solved by fragmenting the community rather than enforcing undesirable norms across it.
- 394549 8y ago
  > This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales Would you say the same about email? Gmail may be huge, but I still wouldn't call email a centralized system. I imagine Mastodon would have a similar fate, if it gets big.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  > This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales. I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system? The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty. The main difference is that, if you want something smaller and less overbearing, it's a lot cheaper to move from mastodon.social to some small instance than it is to move from California to Vermont.
  - wdewind 8y ago
    > I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system? One, or a small number, and because this is the history of these types of things. > The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty. The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it turned in a confederation, removing the right to leave, effectively centralizing it under federal control) when the country was founded. (Edit: I reversed the terms confederation and federation here, but what I mean is that the founding of the US removed sovereignty from the states.) This is where the rubber meets the road: any decentralized system will need to be able to answer the question "how do we [the govt, usually] forcibly remove content from the network?" The way you answer that question will be the way the network centralizes. The history of true confederations (Colonial States, Personal Computing, the Internet) is that they are temporary chaotic moments before we revert back to the mean of centralization (United States, SaaS/FB/Gmail/centralized communication and iphones as tracking devices, PRISM). This is all an instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law. Our culture is not confederated, and so we wont be able to build scalable confederated systems within it.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
"while the design of the system still preserves their freedom to move to another instance if they later decide to do so" No, it doesn't. It allows the user to start over completely from scratch on another instance. This is very much not the same thing.
- setr 8y ago
  With a twitter-like system, is there that much to lose when starting over, other than the community itself? I don't use twitter at all, but I'm imagining a twitter migration similar to a * chan mass migrations; the only baggage to take is the people and their way of doing things. I suppose with twitter you get a history of tweets, but as I understand it, tweets are only accidentally preserved, much in the same way * chans are by archival services. But they're not really meant to be referenced 5 years from now, as a longer-form document might.
TylerE 8y ago
Aren't you then condemned to either suffering the lowest common denominator (Since the value of a network is n^2 - if even a margin chunk of the network can't sue something, it's value rapidly decays) or are doomed to a bunch of kinda-federated-but-not-really cloud of almost compatible ponds instead of one large ocean.

wdewind 8y ago

> I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales. > I think people mostly want a smaller power to do it for them, or at least a "smaller than The Platform, or The Government". People want the freedom of small networks while gaining the moderation protection of larger ones. People's beliefs about this are largely incoherent imo. That being said I'm broadly against heavy handed moderation, and so I'm happy to see it being solved by fragmenting the community rather than enforcing undesirable norms across it.

394549 8y ago
> This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales Would you say the same about email? Gmail may be huge, but I still wouldn't call email a centralized system. I imagine Mastodon would have a similar fate, if it gets big.
hannasanarion 8y ago
> This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales. I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system? The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty. The main difference is that, if you want something smaller and less overbearing, it's a lot cheaper to move from mastodon.social to some small instance than it is to move from California to Vermont.
- wdewind 8y ago
  > I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system? One, or a small number, and because this is the history of these types of things. > The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty. The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it turned in a confederation, removing the right to leave, effectively centralizing it under federal control) when the country was founded. (Edit: I reversed the terms confederation and federation here, but what I mean is that the founding of the US removed sovereignty from the states.) This is where the rubber meets the road: any decentralized system will need to be able to answer the question "how do we [the govt, usually] forcibly remove content from the network?" The way you answer that question will be the way the network centralizes. The history of true confederations (Colonial States, Personal Computing, the Internet) is that they are temporary chaotic moments before we revert back to the mean of centralization (United States, SaaS/FB/Gmail/centralized communication and iphones as tracking devices, PRISM). This is all an instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law. Our culture is not confederated, and so we wont be able to build scalable confederated systems within it.

s73v3r_ 8y ago

"while the design of the system still preserves their freedom to move to another instance if they later decide to do so" No, it doesn't. It allows the user to start over completely from scratch on another instance. This is very much not the same thing.

setr 8y ago
With a twitter-like system, is there that much to lose when starting over, other than the community itself? I don't use twitter at all, but I'm imagining a twitter migration similar to a * chan mass migrations; the only baggage to take is the people and their way of doing things. I suppose with twitter you get a history of tweets, but as I understand it, tweets are only accidentally preserved, much in the same way * chans are by archival services. But they're not really meant to be referenced 5 years from now, as a longer-form document might.

TylerE 8y ago

Aren't you then condemned to either suffering the lowest common denominator (Since the value of a network is n^2 - if even a margin chunk of the network can't sue something, it's value rapidly decays) or are doomed to a bunch of kinda-federated-but-not-really cloud of almost compatible ponds instead of one large ocean.