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> Most of the problems you pose exist with every social media platform, and only get worse as scale goes up. It's the opposite. We have monolithic services bec

by jmyeet 3y ago

> Most of the problems you pose exist with every social media platform, and only get worse as scale goes up. It's the opposite. We have monolithic services because all of these problems benefit from scale. Is it easier to build one system for site safety and the ability to report illegal content or to build more than one? > Each server caches copies of all incoming posts to serve them directly to their local users. There are downsides to this approach, but the positive is that it crudely balances server load across the network. It doesn't load balance anything. It just multiplies the work, particularly given that any such service is going to have a long tail of low-distribution content. Are you going to replicate that preemptively? Or cache-on-demand? If it's the first, it's more work. If it's the second, it's not clear it actually works and certainly adds propagation delay. By this I mean, you can't really produce a feed of content you don't have, for example. > If you start a server that just blasts spam into the fediverse, the network will quickly drop you. Famously, POTS has no issue with spam because of this. > Bad actors aren't much of a concern. Just like POTS, just like email, just like SMS. > As a user, you also have the option to block servers or other users. Blocking servers makes as much sense as blocking a country on Twitter would. > But what about a website for a thousand users? Ten thousand? But it's not. You still have to deal with all the traffic from the rest of the network. Otherwise, what are you displaying to your users? > Fediverse is far from perfect. It's completely unworkable, offers no value proposition to users, is more expensive to implement and is way more complex.

calamari4065 3y ago
>It's completely unworkable, offers no value proposition to users, is more expensive to implement and is way more complex. And yet we still have thriving communities with tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are all pretty happy and satisfied with the way things are. Because you don't understand what the value is doesn't change the fact that a ton of people do find it valuable. Calling mastodon a failed platform is laughable when we have so many people who enjoy it. I mean that literally, it's a running joke and we all laugh at takes like this. We even have memes about it. The value proposition is actually quite simple: it's small, it's decentralized, theres no algorithm, it's wholly independent of corporate or advertiser influence, and it's full of people who value those things highly. It is the antithesis of centralized corporate social media, built by and for people who find the modern corporate web intolerable. What you're complaining about is ActivityPub. It's bad, everyone knows it's bad, we talk about it all the time. There's a great deal of discussion and effort being put into improving it. It comes with some frustrations and odd behavior, but it's largely irrelevant to most users. The fediverse in general has quite a lot of active users, and that count is growing slowly and steadily. Clearly these people find value and utility in these platforms. Claiming it's an unworkable platform with no value is objectively incorrect. > Famously, POTS has no issue with spam You should do some research into this claim.
mariusor 3y ago
> Blocking servers makes as much sense as blocking a country on Twitter would. That's not really the case. Blocking a user is done when the user is mallicious, blocking a server is done when the sysop is malicious, the server is host to bad behaviour, used for spam, etc. Domains and IP's are blocked in SMTP all the time, and the fediverse is just email with social elements attached to it.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  The founding generation of the fediverse may operate with definitions of “sysop is malicious” and “bad behavior” that make little sense to most of the world. For example, back when centralized blocklists were still in vogue, some insisted that servers that failed to ban discussion of libertarianism, ought to go on the blocklist. For whatever reason, some of the founding generation see libertarianism as beyond the pale, as equal to fascism or hate speech. Even as someone who has been annoyed for decades by the libertarian idealism occasionally encountered on nerd forums, that strikes me as a bizarre policy.

by jmyeet 3y ago

calamari4065 3y ago

>It's completely unworkable, offers no value proposition to users, is more expensive to implement and is way more complex. And yet we still have thriving communities with tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are all pretty happy and satisfied with the way things are. Because you don't understand what the value is doesn't change the fact that a ton of people do find it valuable. Calling mastodon a failed platform is laughable when we have so many people who enjoy it. I mean that literally, it's a running joke and we all laugh at takes like this. We even have memes about it. The value proposition is actually quite simple: it's small, it's decentralized, theres no algorithm, it's wholly independent of corporate or advertiser influence, and it's full of people who value those things highly. It is the antithesis of centralized corporate social media, built by and for people who find the modern corporate web intolerable. What you're complaining about is ActivityPub. It's bad, everyone knows it's bad, we talk about it all the time. There's a great deal of discussion and effort being put into improving it. It comes with some frustrations and odd behavior, but it's largely irrelevant to most users. The fediverse in general has quite a lot of active users, and that count is growing slowly and steadily. Clearly these people find value and utility in these platforms. Claiming it's an unworkable platform with no value is objectively incorrect. > Famously, POTS has no issue with spam You should do some research into this claim.

mariusor 3y ago

> Blocking servers makes as much sense as blocking a country on Twitter would. That's not really the case. Blocking a user is done when the user is mallicious, blocking a server is done when the sysop is malicious, the server is host to bad behaviour, used for spam, etc. Domains and IP's are blocked in SMTP all the time, and the fediverse is just email with social elements attached to it.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
The founding generation of the fediverse may operate with definitions of “sysop is malicious” and “bad behavior” that make little sense to most of the world. For example, back when centralized blocklists were still in vogue, some insisted that servers that failed to ban discussion of libertarianism, ought to go on the blocklist. For whatever reason, some of the founding generation see libertarianism as beyond the pale, as equal to fascism or hate speech. Even as someone who has been annoyed for decades by the libertarian idealism occasionally encountered on nerd forums, that strikes me as a bizarre policy.