8 ms·

Ok, now what if I were to tell you that email itself is a federated system, exactly the same as Mastodon. All of your questions can be answered with "what does

by stale2002 8y ago

Ok, now what if I were to tell you that email itself is a federated system, exactly the same as Mastodon. All of your questions can be answered with "what does our currrent email system do?". Sure, most people don't run their own email system. But some do. And you are not forced into a singular option that everyone is required to use. Despite what people might claim, Hotmail, or numerous other email options are all almost as good as Gmail. Having competing options is good enough, as if you get banned from one, you can move to another (with some friction, obviously). On expense, well same answer, what does email do? Yes, it is probably more expensive for all these different email servers to exist, but clearly that's OK, as they exist right now. Now, seeing as tweets and social media posts don't seem like that much more of a difficult problem than email, imagine if those things were federated as well? This doesn't seem to hard to imagine happening.

wdewind 8y ago
Right email is the exact model I'm basing my thinking on. You don't see people running their own email servers, you see 4-5 companies in the world gobbling up the VAST majority of the network, even with weak network effects.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  I've been thinking about this recently myself and also used email as my go-to example -- and it's not lost on me that, if Mastodon really follows that path, we're likely to end up with a few immense instances that provide added services, either in exchange for a small fee or for ads (or, let's be honest, through data mining). I suspect one of the biggest potential places for improvement will be providing a semi-formal process around moderation. The current approach presents itself as a kind of socialist/libertarian communal utopia, and it can be depending on how a given instance is run -- but in practice, each instance is a monarchy with absolute power over not only your presence in the kingdom but which other kingdoms you're allowed to talk to. Your social graph can be broken at any point because your admin has decided, for any reason, to stop federating with an instance you have followers on, or vice-versa. The net effect is that you can be punished for transgressions, real or imagined, that you weren't a party to (and might not even be aware of). And I don't think that has a technical solution, just a policy one. Of course, it's possible that Mastodon -- or, more likely, a future similar network, maybe one built on ActivityPub, too, so it could federate with Mastodon servers transparently -- will solve this by requiring instances to agree to slightly more formal policies around federation and moderation: here is disallowed content, this is the reporting process, this is the appeals process, etc. This can absolutely be done; it was done, three decades or so ago, back in the days of FidoNet. But I suspect the folks most enthusiastic about Mastodon as it exists now would find that anathema.
  - wdewind 8y ago
    Hey thanks for the really thoughtful response! > The current approach presents itself as a kind of socialist/libertarian communal utopia, and it can be depending on how a given instance is run -- but in practice, each instance is a monarchy with absolute power over not only your presence in the kingdom but which other kingdoms you're allowed to talk to. Your social graph can be broken at any point because your admin has decided, for any reason, to stop federating with an instance you have followers on, or vice-versa. The net effect is that you can be punished for transgressions, real or imagined, that you weren't a party to (and might not even be aware of). And I don't think that has a technical solution, just a policy one. This is so spot on! It's easy to say Mastodon is solving all these problems, but the reality is that it's just not big enough that it has faced any real challenges, and the challenges it really faces are mostly philosophical, not technical. AFAICT it hasn't scratched the surface on the philosophical governance issues.

wdewind 8y ago

Right email is the exact model I'm basing my thinking on. You don't see people running their own email servers, you see 4-5 companies in the world gobbling up the VAST majority of the network, even with weak network effects.

chipotle_coyote 8y ago
I've been thinking about this recently myself and also used email as my go-to example -- and it's not lost on me that, if Mastodon really follows that path, we're likely to end up with a few immense instances that provide added services, either in exchange for a small fee or for ads (or, let's be honest, through data mining). I suspect one of the biggest potential places for improvement will be providing a semi-formal process around moderation. The current approach presents itself as a kind of socialist/libertarian communal utopia, and it can be depending on how a given instance is run -- but in practice, each instance is a monarchy with absolute power over not only your presence in the kingdom but which other kingdoms you're allowed to talk to. Your social graph can be broken at any point because your admin has decided, for any reason, to stop federating with an instance you have followers on, or vice-versa. The net effect is that you can be punished for transgressions, real or imagined, that you weren't a party to (and might not even be aware of). And I don't think that has a technical solution, just a policy one. Of course, it's possible that Mastodon -- or, more likely, a future similar network, maybe one built on ActivityPub, too, so it could federate with Mastodon servers transparently -- will solve this by requiring instances to agree to slightly more formal policies around federation and moderation: here is disallowed content, this is the reporting process, this is the appeals process, etc. This can absolutely be done; it was done, three decades or so ago, back in the days of FidoNet. But I suspect the folks most enthusiastic about Mastodon as it exists now would find that anathema.
- wdewind 8y ago
  Hey thanks for the really thoughtful response! > The current approach presents itself as a kind of socialist/libertarian communal utopia, and it can be depending on how a given instance is run -- but in practice, each instance is a monarchy with absolute power over not only your presence in the kingdom but which other kingdoms you're allowed to talk to. Your social graph can be broken at any point because your admin has decided, for any reason, to stop federating with an instance you have followers on, or vice-versa. The net effect is that you can be punished for transgressions, real or imagined, that you weren't a party to (and might not even be aware of). And I don't think that has a technical solution, just a policy one. This is so spot on! It's easy to say Mastodon is solving all these problems, but the reality is that it's just not big enough that it has faced any real challenges, and the challenges it really faces are mostly philosophical, not technical. AFAICT it hasn't scratched the surface on the philosophical governance issues.