4 ms·

"they".. Really on the fediverse it's very much on an instance by instance basis. really it's like saying that email is a haven for some group or other. Don't s

by draxil 4y ago

"they".. Really on the fediverse it's very much on an instance by instance basis. really it's like saying that email is a haven for some group or other. Don't shoot the protocol!

glenstein 4y ago
Yeah, I've been on it since roughly 2017 and that's not at all the prevailing cultural association with Mastodon in my experience. Numerous communities have decided to move off of Twitter and on to mastodon, including lgbtq folks, furries, sex workers, FOSS enthusiasts. My understanding is that on the most popular instances, there's active exclusion and de federating extremist content, and those things live on repurposed versions of the underlying Mastodon software but are not at all connected to the community.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Protocols can encourage rogue or unsustainable behaviour. That's largely what happened with Usenet, and seems to be well-in-process with email. Mastodon is an implementation of the ActivityPub standard. I've been on the platform since 2017, five years now, and have watched it go through various teething and growing pains, including mutually-incompatible cultures (e.g., Japanese Lolicon vs. World, also attempts by Gab and similar groups to join, largely rejected). There are strengths, including instance-level controls over moderation and peering / federation. That's scaled acceptably to a few thousand instances, but would likely be stressed were the network to grow to even a small fraction of the world's largest social networks. Given a one-tier model (users -> instances -> network), 10^10 active participants and balancing users to instances would require on the order of 10^5 users per instance, and 10^5 instances --- which is to say, 10^5 peering relations. Given that most present admins are managing their peering / blocking relationships in their heads with a very minimal configuration system, that scaling problem seems unlikely to succeed. My suspicion is that more tiers of relationships will appear, effective a hub-and-spoke system, of members, instances, and hubs, with roughly 1,000 of each on average. (This gives you about 1 billion total participants.) What a "hub" means, or does, and how it interacts ... raises interesting questions. Which are entirely unaddressed so far as I'm aware. (Note that in meatspace, we typically have geographic aggregations of people -> cities -> counties/states/provinces -> countries, or fourt to five levels of aggregation. This gives, in theory, roughly 100 members within each category. Clearly that's very rough, with cities often having far more people, and counties / states / provinces frequently having far fewer cities than the model would suggest. A large country might have ~100 major cities (again, some more, some fewer), and there are, counting as a physicist does, about 100 countries in the world (195 per worldometers).) I've been largely pretty happy with Mastodon. I'm under no illusion that its success is guaranteed, or that it is inherently resistant to abuse or misuse.

by draxil 4y ago

"they".. Really on the fediverse it's very much on an instance by instance basis. really it's like saying that email is a haven for some group or other. Don't shoot the protocol!

glenstein 4y ago

Yeah, I've been on it since roughly 2017 and that's not at all the prevailing cultural association with Mastodon in my experience. Numerous communities have decided to move off of Twitter and on to mastodon, including lgbtq folks, furries, sex workers, FOSS enthusiasts. My understanding is that on the most popular instances, there's active exclusion and de federating extremist content, and those things live on repurposed versions of the underlying Mastodon software but are not at all connected to the community.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Protocols can encourage rogue or unsustainable behaviour. That's largely what happened with Usenet, and seems to be well-in-process with email. Mastodon is an implementation of the ActivityPub standard. I've been on the platform since 2017, five years now, and have watched it go through various teething and growing pains, including mutually-incompatible cultures (e.g., Japanese Lolicon vs. World, also attempts by Gab and similar groups to join, largely rejected). There are strengths, including instance-level controls over moderation and peering / federation. That's scaled acceptably to a few thousand instances, but would likely be stressed were the network to grow to even a small fraction of the world's largest social networks. Given a one-tier model (users -> instances -> network), 10^10 active participants and balancing users to instances would require on the order of 10^5 users per instance, and 10^5 instances --- which is to say, 10^5 peering relations. Given that most present admins are managing their peering / blocking relationships in their heads with a very minimal configuration system, that scaling problem seems unlikely to succeed. My suspicion is that more tiers of relationships will appear, effective a hub-and-spoke system, of members, instances, and hubs, with roughly 1,000 of each on average. (This gives you about 1 billion total participants.) What a "hub" means, or does, and how it interacts ... raises interesting questions. Which are entirely unaddressed so far as I'm aware. (Note that in meatspace, we typically have geographic aggregations of people -> cities -> counties/states/provinces -> countries, or fourt to five levels of aggregation. This gives, in theory, roughly 100 members within each category. Clearly that's very rough, with cities often having far more people, and counties / states / provinces frequently having far fewer cities than the model would suggest. A large country might have ~100 major cities (again, some more, some fewer), and there are, counting as a physicist does, about 100 countries in the world (195 per worldometers).) I've been largely pretty happy with Mastodon. I'm under no illusion that its success is guaranteed, or that it is inherently resistant to abuse or misuse.