4 ms·

I guess the questions this raises next for me are: Would this scale if a given instance somehow gained the level of adoption people seem to value in a Twitter

I guess the questions this raises next for me are: Would this scale if a given instance somehow gained the level of adoption people seem to value in a Twitter or a Facebook? It seems to me that the major draw and reason people stay on those services is the fact that they can communicate with essentially everyone in one place. Also, to follow the first question, given that a major (if not the only) draw for most users is the ability to communicate with everyone, wouldn't that result in relatively few (or one) instance gaining dominance over time? You want to be connected to all of your friends and family, of course. But then all of them also want to be able to read what Beyonce or Trump or Biden or Bill Gates is saying. Their barbers and bartenders want to post the latest specials to all of their current and potential clients. If you all have to agree on an instance/sub-network/server/etc to use, why would people choose anything but the one everyone else is on? I guess it might make it easier to migrate to a better-run or better-supported instance and add a bit of healthy competition to keep things in line, but from what I've seen of Facebook and Twitter, the near impossibility of getting people to switch to another competing service en masse always overpowers any individual's complaints about the current state of affairs. Facebook sucks? Well, why not swap over to that new ServiceX? Well...sure it's nicer but nobody is on it!

vorpalhex 6y ago
The draw of the fediverse is that you can follow cross-instance. I can be in my local community instance and follow people on say a major software instance and also an art oriented instance. It doesn't really matter who is on what instance. Connecting instances up is trivial - you join into the feeds generally. Your instance more dictates your general discovery patterns and local moderation. In picking a local instance, I'm going to generally see discovery material related to my local area. If I joined an art instance, it would be art material, etc. Generally well behaved instances (ie not spammy) shouldn't have an issue with getting federated, even if they're relatively small.
rapnie 6y ago
Good points. First of all, it doesn't matter which instance you're on. You can still follow your friends, influencers, etc. on other instances.. unless your instance has the other instance in its blocklist (e.g. if it doesn't adhere to moderation rules that apply on your instance). Natural re-centralization is an issue, with mastodon.technology and mastodon.social being by far the largest instances. This could devolve to a situation like you have with email / Gmail. Another challenge is that Mastodon as early adopter of ActivityPub has made a number of required implementation choices to fill in the blanks of the spec. They support a bunch of custom properties in the message format, plus they use the Mastodon client API instead of ActivityPub client-to-server. Their dominance wrt running Mastodon instances means they have a big say in how Fediverse evolves. Luckily the project team is open-minded, and mostly on the same page to others wrt fediverse innovation.
- soylentcola 6y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. I'm not terribly educated on the state of Mastodon/similar federated social media. Also interesting that you brought up Gmail/email. I've thought for a while (admittedly as someone far more on the "user" side than the "developer" one) about how email is an example of how things might work better. For as much as Gmail and a few others have captured the vast majority of the average userbase for personal email, it's still reasonably easy to choose a different provider (and can even roll your own if you really thought it worthwhile). Switching email providers doesn't stop me from emailing people who use Hotmail or Gmail (ignoring for a minute any issues of overzealous filtering of uncommon mail servers). The individual services can implement their various extra features like spam blocking, auto sorting, etc. but for the most part, the common protocol means that an email from me@me.server can still be sent to a list of addresses at gmail.com, aol.com, hotmail.com, etc. If I want to send a message to people on Facebook, I need an active "valid" Facebook account that can be tied to their social graph.
intended 6y ago
I agree. The issue with social media isn't the tech, its the people and its power structures forming over social networks. This whole thing, social media, derives from 2 types of issues: Errors/Flaws in natural thinking, and malignant hacking of brains. The second will always arise when you have more than 100 people in a group, and said group has some non trivial impact on voting patterns. At that point, this group is like a unprotected bank account - which will be hacked. The normal response is to protect this account and to target hackers - but current social thought (excluding China) has huge issues when it comes to censoring speech - and especially political speech. Add to it layers of additional complexity, (political parties can abuse the laws and say they are being unfairly censored), and the distance between this solution and the underlying human problems seems equidistant as that of current Social media and the same problems.

vorpalhex 6y ago

The draw of the fediverse is that you can follow cross-instance. I can be in my local community instance and follow people on say a major software instance and also an art oriented instance. It doesn't really matter who is on what instance. Connecting instances up is trivial - you join into the feeds generally. Your instance more dictates your general discovery patterns and local moderation. In picking a local instance, I'm going to generally see discovery material related to my local area. If I joined an art instance, it would be art material, etc. Generally well behaved instances (ie not spammy) shouldn't have an issue with getting federated, even if they're relatively small.

rapnie 6y ago

Good points. First of all, it doesn't matter which instance you're on. You can still follow your friends, influencers, etc. on other instances.. unless your instance has the other instance in its blocklist (e.g. if it doesn't adhere to moderation rules that apply on your instance). Natural re-centralization is an issue, with mastodon.technology and mastodon.social being by far the largest instances. This could devolve to a situation like you have with email / Gmail. Another challenge is that Mastodon as early adopter of ActivityPub has made a number of required implementation choices to fill in the blanks of the spec. They support a bunch of custom properties in the message format, plus they use the Mastodon client API instead of ActivityPub client-to-server. Their dominance wrt running Mastodon instances means they have a big say in how Fediverse evolves. Luckily the project team is open-minded, and mostly on the same page to others wrt fediverse innovation.

soylentcola 6y ago
Thanks for the clarification. I'm not terribly educated on the state of Mastodon/similar federated social media. Also interesting that you brought up Gmail/email. I've thought for a while (admittedly as someone far more on the "user" side than the "developer" one) about how email is an example of how things might work better. For as much as Gmail and a few others have captured the vast majority of the average userbase for personal email, it's still reasonably easy to choose a different provider (and can even roll your own if you really thought it worthwhile). Switching email providers doesn't stop me from emailing people who use Hotmail or Gmail (ignoring for a minute any issues of overzealous filtering of uncommon mail servers). The individual services can implement their various extra features like spam blocking, auto sorting, etc. but for the most part, the common protocol means that an email from me@me.server can still be sent to a list of addresses at gmail.com, aol.com, hotmail.com, etc. If I want to send a message to people on Facebook, I need an active "valid" Facebook account that can be tied to their social graph.

intended 6y ago

I agree. The issue with social media isn't the tech, its the people and its power structures forming over social networks. This whole thing, social media, derives from 2 types of issues: Errors/Flaws in natural thinking, and malignant hacking of brains. The second will always arise when you have more than 100 people in a group, and said group has some non trivial impact on voting patterns. At that point, this group is like a unprotected bank account - which will be hacked. The normal response is to protect this account and to target hackers - but current social thought (excluding China) has huge issues when it comes to censoring speech - and especially political speech. Add to it layers of additional complexity, (political parties can abuse the laws and say they are being unfairly censored), and the distance between this solution and the underlying human problems seems equidistant as that of current Social media and the same problems.