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All of this is what I expected: Mastodon is a great big set of public goods problem waiting to happen, and it will take over from Twitter on the Year of Linux o

by dash2 4y ago

All of this is what I expected: Mastodon is a great big set of public goods problem waiting to happen, and it will take over from Twitter on the Year of Linux on the Desktop. Public goods problems include: * Who makes it easy to onboard people? * Who is responsible for Mastodon not having a reputation - based on some servers, not all but some is enough - as a sink of depravity? * What happens if, say, anti-Rohingya activists decide to use Mastodon to spread propaganda and plan violence? * Who will fix the server when it breaks at midnight? Who will pay them? * Who will pay for hosting if this is going to scale to the whole world? What is the funding model? The solution to bad companies - if you think Twitter on Musk will be terrible - is better companies. It is not software run by a collective of Boy Scouts.

root_axis 4y ago
All good points, but I think more important than any of them: lacking billions of dollars for growth hacking. These gigantic social media sites didn't become huge organically, they've all dumped boatloads of cash into growing the user base, something a federated social network can never do.
rsynnott 4y ago
> What happens if, say, anti-Rohingya activists decide to use Mastodon to spread propaganda and plan violence? Then everyone defederates. There's precedent for this; Gab is a Mastodon instance for Neo-Nazis, which practically no-one federates with (Truth Social is also a Mastodon instance, but I think it voluntarily doesn't attempt to federate with anyone).