4 ms·

Mastodon may very well kill Twitter. What make you think that a company with descent financial backing can't scale a Mastodon instance to Twitter-size levels?

macjc 4y ago
In my view, its basic idea is wrong. Mastodon reduces the connection between communities and will have worse "free speech" problems when it reaches the twitter scale. If money could solve everything, google+ would still be a thing today.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  You make it sound like a company running a large Mastodon instance scaled across hundreds of thousands of nodes couldn't make changes to solve whatever "free speech" problems. Just because it is open source doesn't mean that they couldn't make changes and contribute to the code upstream to solve many of these issues.
- rolenthedeep 4y ago
  I think you've got it a little backwards there. Smaller communities are easier to moderate. Reduced interaction with other communities means that any one person can only have a limited effect before a remote moderator intervenes. What happens when a toxic community starts causing problems in the wider network? Quite simply, they get cut off from the network. Every individual user can block an entire instance. Each server can also block another instance. There is also precedent for ALL servers to block one particularly bad instance. You probably can't prevent toxic communities from forming. Since it's an open protocol, you also can't prevent certain political parties from setting up their "free speech" instance and doing what they do. But you can cut them off from everyone else just trying to have a good time. The community structure should tend to gather like-minded people together. That would mean some instances becoming intensely toxic. Which is what we have seen happen. On the other hand the isolated structure makes it easy to just ban that entire community with one button.
rolenthedeep 4y ago
Mastodon has some structural problems, and instances do not scale well. Mastodon.social is run by Eugen (who created mastodon), and he's had to disable core features of the service (local and federated timelines) just to cope with the sheer number of users. AFAIK, it would take significant work to rewrite the software such that it scales the way Twitter does.
baby 4y ago
Is there a historical precedent for this? An distributed version of a centralized system winning? My only example is email and it's horrible.

macjc 4y ago

In my view, its basic idea is wrong. Mastodon reduces the connection between communities and will have worse "free speech" problems when it reaches the twitter scale. If money could solve everything, google+ would still be a thing today.

encryptluks2 4y ago
You make it sound like a company running a large Mastodon instance scaled across hundreds of thousands of nodes couldn't make changes to solve whatever "free speech" problems. Just because it is open source doesn't mean that they couldn't make changes and contribute to the code upstream to solve many of these issues.
rolenthedeep 4y ago
I think you've got it a little backwards there. Smaller communities are easier to moderate. Reduced interaction with other communities means that any one person can only have a limited effect before a remote moderator intervenes. What happens when a toxic community starts causing problems in the wider network? Quite simply, they get cut off from the network. Every individual user can block an entire instance. Each server can also block another instance. There is also precedent for ALL servers to block one particularly bad instance. You probably can't prevent toxic communities from forming. Since it's an open protocol, you also can't prevent certain political parties from setting up their "free speech" instance and doing what they do. But you can cut them off from everyone else just trying to have a good time. The community structure should tend to gather like-minded people together. That would mean some instances becoming intensely toxic. Which is what we have seen happen. On the other hand the isolated structure makes it easy to just ban that entire community with one button.

rolenthedeep 4y ago

Mastodon has some structural problems, and instances do not scale well. Mastodon.social is run by Eugen (who created mastodon), and he's had to disable core features of the service (local and federated timelines) just to cope with the sheer number of users. AFAIK, it would take significant work to rewrite the software such that it scales the way Twitter does.

baby 4y ago

Is there a historical precedent for this? An distributed version of a centralized system winning? My only example is email and it's horrible.