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Twitter used to have failwhales I remember the failwhale days, but this is different. Twitter is a VC-backed company that had the resources to build out thei

Twitter used to have failwhales I remember the failwhale days, but this is different. Twitter is a VC-backed company that had the resources to build out their infrastructure. Mastodon is a bunch of volunteer-run servers and it looks pretty obvious they aren’t going to be able to handle the infusion of new users… unless there’s an infusion of resources. I’m on mastodon.social and it has slowed to a crawl, compared to what I was used to 6 months ago. Also the UI/UX isn’t great. Say what you will about Twitter, but they’ve built a pretty slick web application and native apps. People used to the simplicity of Twitter are going to struggle, if the complaints on my Twitter timeline are any indication.

neltnerb 4y ago
There is an infusion of resources. One option that seems common is that users aren't required to contribute towards hosting fees, but donations are easily accepted -- that is how the sustainable ones work from what I have seen. It seems to work pretty well? It's very transparent, which I like -- "we got a bunch of new users, the server bill is going up $2k a month overall so if you can pitch in please do" is extremely clear and seems to work effectively. An individual server seems like it should be able to charge for hosting your account like with email if it needed to be operated like a business. So far it doesn't really seem like it needs to operate like a business, it just takes longer for collectives of humans to respond to changes in needs than a giant enormously wealthy company that knew what would happen in advance. I'm sure it will equilibrate, it has the last two times this happened.