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I would have been more interested in Cohost if they weren't actively hostile to federation. Their eventual shutdown always seemed inevitable to me, and without

I would have been more interested in Cohost if they weren't actively hostile to federation. Their eventual shutdown always seemed inevitable to me, and without federation + account portability, there would be no easy offramp when they failed. You could say the same of almost all corporate social media, and I am phasing them all out too.

kevingadd 2y ago
Federation wouldn't have meaningfully solved their revenue problems, though. It would have just been a massive engineering timesink.
- skyfaller 2y ago
  It could have helped their revenue problems indirectly if it meant being able to access more users and content, not only the people who use and enjoy Cohost. People love to talk about network effects, and something like the fediverse means you can start with however many users there are on the fediverse on day one of turning on federation. For me, lack of federation meant they were dead on arrival, just like every Google product can't be trusted to keep existing (and I would never start using a new Google product). Any individual fediverse project could shut down, but the fediverse continues and is probably unkillable like IRC or RSS at this point, even if it's not as widely used as one might like.
  - kevingadd 2y ago
    This comes down to a question of what kind of service you want. If you want a way to "access more users and content", you can already make an account on a Fediverse instance and access those users and content there. What does Cohost offer by being yet another instance with custom software? If the vast majority of the content I'm accessing is from other instances/services, why would I pay Cohost money for the privilege of having them act as an intermediary? One specific problem with federation/decentralization is that you've now decentralized moderation and given up control over your service's culture entirely. This has some upsides and some downsides, but it again puts you into a weird position: If your moderation and culture position are identical to Mastodon's, why do you need to exist? If you're just another Mastodon instance, why would anyone give you money? When I post on HN or Twitter or Tumblr or Cohost, I at least have a good sense of how the service is moderated, what the rules are, etc. When I post on decentralized services, at any point I can discover that oh, this random instance defederated the one I was unlucky enough to sign up on, so half of my mutuals can't see my posts anymore. Don't worry, you can just migrate your account to a different instance with different rules, and hope IT doesn't get defederated! And because each instance has different rules and culture, you get to look forward to people from other instances complaining that you aren't complying with their rules. It's messy! It's not fun! Of course the rules on those services I mentioned aren't necessarily going to suit everyone's tastes. But I think that's good - a social media service doesn't need to be For Everyone to be successful, and being For Nobody is a horrible outcome. At the end of the day I see the appeal of defederation but it simply doesn't make sense as a way to spend your engineering dollars if your goal is to be profitable. It Doesn't Make You Money.
  - aseipp 2y ago
    > It could have helped Narrator: It could not have helped, it would have mostly just made them even more burnt out, because they (as they said in the post) were already on call effectively 7 days a week and have been since the site started. > the fediverse continues and is probably unkillable like IRC or RSS at this point Who cares? When an IRC channel, or phpbb forum I use closes down, or an RSS feed I used to read goes dark -- I do not think about the wonderful IRC protocol and how ossified it is or about the sanctity of DNS. And these things happen regardless of what the underlying technology stack are. I think "It really sucks that my community and the people on it are gone now." A domain that doesn't resolve and an empty mastodon instance are effectively the same. The users who use the platform are why the platform is valuable, not because it uses some dumb particular tech stack.
rglullis 2y ago
So you are saying that you would pay for an account for Mastodon or Lemmy?
- discardedrefuse 2y ago
  You might be surprised to learn that many people do donate money to their instance of choice. Enough to cover server and admin costs? Probably not. But it shows some willingness to pay.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    This is not what I am asking. I am asking if OP would join a commercial provider of Mastodon, where access is only given to paying subscribers. I am asking because I happen to run one of those (https://communick.com https://communick.com) since 2019.
    - jonathanyc 2y ago
      I was actually searching for a commercial Mastodon host around a year ago. I would have been interested in your service but it did not come up in any search results. I remember checking out Librem One, but the signup process for that was very buggy. Other services were targeted towards people who wanted to host instances themselves, not just have an account. Even now I can’t find your service in the first page of my search results. I ended up just setting up a recurring donation to Mastodon.social via Patreon. Your service looks very cool. Just pointing out that it is very hard to discover even for people who are willing to pay, as the GP comment notes and hopefully providing a useful experience report.
      - rglullis 2y ago
        Yeah, in my case it gets specially hard because Mastodon's project page does not point to commercial providers, only hosting services. To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web. I am more inclined to pivot into a multi-protocol client (like Pidgin) and offering ancillary services than trying to pick a champion and invest into promoting it.

kevingadd 2y ago

Federation wouldn't have meaningfully solved their revenue problems, though. It would have just been a massive engineering timesink.

skyfaller 2y ago
It could have helped their revenue problems indirectly if it meant being able to access more users and content, not only the people who use and enjoy Cohost. People love to talk about network effects, and something like the fediverse means you can start with however many users there are on the fediverse on day one of turning on federation. For me, lack of federation meant they were dead on arrival, just like every Google product can't be trusted to keep existing (and I would never start using a new Google product). Any individual fediverse project could shut down, but the fediverse continues and is probably unkillable like IRC or RSS at this point, even if it's not as widely used as one might like.
- kevingadd 2y ago
  This comes down to a question of what kind of service you want. If you want a way to "access more users and content", you can already make an account on a Fediverse instance and access those users and content there. What does Cohost offer by being yet another instance with custom software? If the vast majority of the content I'm accessing is from other instances/services, why would I pay Cohost money for the privilege of having them act as an intermediary? One specific problem with federation/decentralization is that you've now decentralized moderation and given up control over your service's culture entirely. This has some upsides and some downsides, but it again puts you into a weird position: If your moderation and culture position are identical to Mastodon's, why do you need to exist? If you're just another Mastodon instance, why would anyone give you money? When I post on HN or Twitter or Tumblr or Cohost, I at least have a good sense of how the service is moderated, what the rules are, etc. When I post on decentralized services, at any point I can discover that oh, this random instance defederated the one I was unlucky enough to sign up on, so half of my mutuals can't see my posts anymore. Don't worry, you can just migrate your account to a different instance with different rules, and hope IT doesn't get defederated! And because each instance has different rules and culture, you get to look forward to people from other instances complaining that you aren't complying with their rules. It's messy! It's not fun! Of course the rules on those services I mentioned aren't necessarily going to suit everyone's tastes. But I think that's good - a social media service doesn't need to be For Everyone to be successful, and being For Nobody is a horrible outcome. At the end of the day I see the appeal of defederation but it simply doesn't make sense as a way to spend your engineering dollars if your goal is to be profitable. It Doesn't Make You Money.
- aseipp 2y ago
  > It could have helped Narrator: It could not have helped, it would have mostly just made them even more burnt out, because they (as they said in the post) were already on call effectively 7 days a week and have been since the site started. > the fediverse continues and is probably unkillable like IRC or RSS at this point Who cares? When an IRC channel, or phpbb forum I use closes down, or an RSS feed I used to read goes dark -- I do not think about the wonderful IRC protocol and how ossified it is or about the sanctity of DNS. And these things happen regardless of what the underlying technology stack are. I think "It really sucks that my community and the people on it are gone now." A domain that doesn't resolve and an empty mastodon instance are effectively the same. The users who use the platform are why the platform is valuable, not because it uses some dumb particular tech stack.

rglullis 2y ago

So you are saying that you would pay for an account for Mastodon or Lemmy?

discardedrefuse 2y ago
You might be surprised to learn that many people do donate money to their instance of choice. Enough to cover server and admin costs? Probably not. But it shows some willingness to pay.
- rglullis 2y ago
  This is not what I am asking. I am asking if OP would join a commercial provider of Mastodon, where access is only given to paying subscribers. I am asking because I happen to run one of those (https://communick.com https://communick.com) since 2019.
  - jonathanyc 2y ago
    I was actually searching for a commercial Mastodon host around a year ago. I would have been interested in your service but it did not come up in any search results. I remember checking out Librem One, but the signup process for that was very buggy. Other services were targeted towards people who wanted to host instances themselves, not just have an account. Even now I can’t find your service in the first page of my search results. I ended up just setting up a recurring donation to Mastodon.social via Patreon. Your service looks very cool. Just pointing out that it is very hard to discover even for people who are willing to pay, as the GP comment notes and hopefully providing a useful experience report.
    - rglullis 2y ago
      Yeah, in my case it gets specially hard because Mastodon's project page does not point to commercial providers, only hosting services. To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web. I am more inclined to pivot into a multi-protocol client (like Pidgin) and offering ancillary services than trying to pick a champion and invest into promoting it.