4 ms·

y'know, this would be the opportunity for Google to gain some clout in the social network world. Start up a hosted mastodon instance, make a bit of fuzz and PR

y'know, this would be the opportunity for Google to gain some clout in the social network world. Start up a hosted mastodon instance, make a bit of fuzz and PR around it, and then over time invest some resources into making it more awesome. All for relatively little effort, compared to starting a new social network from scratch. The largest effort would likely go into moderation on that instance. Who else could do that? Maybe New York Times? Apple? It needs to be someone with an established brand, and the engineering skills to run it at scale. (Disclaimer: not my own idea, heard it somewhere else -- maybe on risky.biz?)

dmitriid 4y ago
Google bought Orkut. Shut it down Google had Google Wave. Shut it down Google had Google Plus. Shut it down. ... If Google unveiled a Mastodon instance tomorrow, why would people believe that Google had any interest in developing and maintaining a social network
- blowski 4y ago
  Indeed, this sounds like the very definition of "out of the frying pan into the fire".
emptyparadise 4y ago
I remember what Google did to XMPP with Google Talk.
jefftk 4y ago
It wouldn't be anywhere near that simple: * If there are security vulnerabilities in Mastodon and Google is hosting an instance then Google would be blamed, which means they would need to do a very thorough security review before hosting one. * If they announced it and lots of people wanted to join it would probably have far more members than the biggest Mastodon instances do today, so they would want to make sure they had something that could scale horizontally. I don't think the current codebase can do that? * There are various places where the current design of Mastodon doesn't match user expectations around privacy and control over their content. For example, if you delete something it looks to you like it's deleted but that delete may not fully propagate. By hosting a server Google would be taking responsibility for this, and would have people mad at them (likely with lawsuits) when it didn't do what they expected. This isn't to say that Google would never get into the federated social network space, but it would be after building their own activity pub implementation. (Disclosure: I used to work at Google)

dmitriid 4y ago

Google bought Orkut. Shut it down Google had Google Wave. Shut it down Google had Google Plus. Shut it down. ... If Google unveiled a Mastodon instance tomorrow, why would people believe that Google had any interest in developing and maintaining a social network

blowski 4y ago
Indeed, this sounds like the very definition of "out of the frying pan into the fire".

emptyparadise 4y ago

I remember what Google did to XMPP with Google Talk.

jefftk 4y ago

It wouldn't be anywhere near that simple: * If there are security vulnerabilities in Mastodon and Google is hosting an instance then Google would be blamed, which means they would need to do a very thorough security review before hosting one. * If they announced it and lots of people wanted to join it would probably have far more members than the biggest Mastodon instances do today, so they would want to make sure they had something that could scale horizontally. I don't think the current codebase can do that? * There are various places where the current design of Mastodon doesn't match user expectations around privacy and control over their content. For example, if you delete something it looks to you like it's deleted but that delete may not fully propagate. By hosting a server Google would be taking responsibility for this, and would have people mad at them (likely with lawsuits) when it didn't do what they expected. This isn't to say that Google would never get into the federated social network space, but it would be after building their own activity pub implementation. (Disclosure: I used to work at Google)