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Right, the issue here is like if Wil Wheaton starts hanging out at a café, and it's just a small café, and the owner at first thinks it's pretty cool that a ce

Right, the issue here is like if Wil Wheaton starts hanging out at a café, and it's just a small café, and the owner at first thinks it's pretty cool that a celeb is hanging out there, and some trekkies start coming by, which increases the vibe of the place... ... but then a bunch of guys in stormtrooper outfits start showing up every day and the trekkies start fighting with them and the cops are getting called out and pretty much eventually the owner is going to ask Mr. Wheaton to stop coming by. And because it's just someone else's café, he pretty much has to do that. The good news is, going to that café is not the only way for him to participate in the fediverse. He is the proud owner and operator of wilwheaton.net, and he can point that at his own activitypub server, that nobody can kick him off. He can bulk block all stormtroopers, interact with the trekkies in the café, and handle his own bandwidth and compute bills for delivering his content to all his fans. Bonus: the fact he's posting from @wil@wilwheaton.net acts as a pretty solid cast iron guarantee of authenticity, that you are dealing with the one and only actual Wil Wheaton. Meanwhile, Stephen King is sat at the café down the road trying to figure out why the new owner there wants him to pay him $8 a month to have the owner keep telling people who walk in 'yep, that's the real Stephen King over there'.

dredmorbius 4y ago
If the cafe advertises itself for all, and as a kinder, gentler, happier, more ethical, and safer place than BigCafe, then ... at least some of the onus is on the cafe owner(s), creator(s), and operator(s). I've been on Mastodon since 2016. I enjoy and appreciate it. I admire the goals. But much of the "it's intrinsically better / safe / scalable" talk seems based on little more than hope and faith, rather than evidence and engineering. And given the Fediverse's own protocols, operating out of MyCafe rather than SafeCafe or BigCafe ... only provides modest additional protections. Yes, it helps assert identity more effectively (as I've previously noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33512169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33512169>), but it only solves a small portion of the abuse, trust, and safety concerns. Mechanisms simply are not yet sufficiently robust for a large-scale (100m -- billions of MAU) social network. Some of that will come in time, though I've concerns that there are weaknesses that have already been baked into the underlying architecture and assumptions.

dredmorbius 4y ago

If the cafe advertises itself for all, and as a kinder, gentler, happier, more ethical, and safer place than BigCafe, then ... at least some of the onus is on the cafe owner(s), creator(s), and operator(s). I've been on Mastodon since 2016. I enjoy and appreciate it. I admire the goals. But much of the "it's intrinsically better / safe / scalable" talk seems based on little more than hope and faith, rather than evidence and engineering. And given the Fediverse's own protocols, operating out of MyCafe rather than SafeCafe or BigCafe ... only provides modest additional protections. Yes, it helps assert identity more effectively (as I've previously noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33512169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33512169>), but it only solves a small portion of the abuse, trust, and safety concerns. Mechanisms simply are not yet sufficiently robust for a large-scale (100m -- billions of MAU) social network. Some of that will come in time, though I've concerns that there are weaknesses that have already been baked into the underlying architecture and assumptions.