3 ms·

Federated networks like Mastadon strike me as being centralization at scale. They don’t appear to solve any of the power dynamics of users and operators - user

Federated networks like Mastadon strike me as being centralization at scale. They don’t appear to solve any of the power dynamics of users and operators - users are still at the mercy of the operator - and they run on either altruism or monetization. Mastadon appears to have successfully created N copies of the Facebook problem, which is definitely better than where we were.

LeoPanthera 2y ago
> users are still at the mercy of the operator Mastodon allows you to be the operator, if you so choose.
- ketzo 2y ago
  I think OP’s point is that most users don’t choose to do so. Whether because of lack of ability, interest, time, whatever, people would mostly rather just be users.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > Mastodon allows you to be the operator, if you so choose. ... and if you forget a critical update or you see it too late, you'll get hacked. Self-hosting anything comes with serious challenges that most people only realize in hindsight.
MBCook 2y ago
I like Mastodon, it’s the only Twitter like thing I use. But I think this just reflects the facts. Centralization works and is highly preferable for many users. Just like in the only big federated service: email. Yes you can run your own. But there are a lot of costs in terms of time/complexity/knowledge/trust to that. Outsourcing it to someone else is really nice. You don’t need one big instance like Twitter was. Having a small handful of big ones works well too. But the dream some people seemed to have where everyone should run their own instance alone or with a few friends was never going to happen.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > Centralization works and is highly preferable for many users. I don't think users care about that at all, and if they have it explained to them, hate it. I think the real problem is that we haven't decentralized ownership and decisionmaking, instead we shattered big dictatorships into little fiefdoms, often run by local gangs (as one would expect.) Arguing that federation should automatically solve our problems with social media is like the US argument for "state's rights." You had one problem, now you have 50. This is also exacerbated by the fact that people can't migrate. That would seem like it should be a developer priority to enable competition between instances, but instead people get irritated when asked about it at all. Every post locks you in farther to a particular instance. If people can leave on a whim, bad instances would starve. Instead of people being able to vote with their feet, the politics of mastodon all revolve around punishing other instances for various examples wrongthink by defederating. So now it's little fiefdoms at war with each other, you have to be in the in-crowd of your likely randomly chosen instance to have a say about it, and if you leave you lose everything.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    My experience is that tons of people heard about Mastodon when the first wave of Musk bullshit hit Twitter and they immediately had an allergic reaction to having to pick a server. They don't realise there's no practical difference from email (which they're already using) but somehow the need to pick a server baffles and confuses the average social media user. Instead, everyone seems to be joining Bluesky now, which is also federated but doesn't mention it anywhere so users can just join the main instance. I expect this will cause massive problems in the future when federation will start taking place on a serious scale and the risks of misleading users by using similar usernames on other servers start applying. People don't know the network is federated and there's no easy way to read up about it without diving into dev documents.
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      Even the “main instance” on bluesky is a cluster of instances; it’s just not exposed in a way that causes the choice issue. And since you have full account portability, if you ever want to change, it’s at least possible.
Nathan2055 2y ago
This is why I believe that Bluesky and the AT protocol is a significantly more attractive system than Mastodon and ActivityPub. Frankly, we’ve tried the kind of system ActivityPub offers before: a decentralized server network ultimately forming one big system, and the same problems have inevitably popped up every time. XMPP tried to do it for chat. All the big players adopted it and then either realized that the protocol wasn’t complex enough for the features they wanted to offer or that it was much better financially to invest in a closed system. Sometimes both. The big providers split off into their own systems (remember, Google Talk/Hangouts/Chat and Apple iChat/FaceTime both started out as XMPP front-ends) and the dream of interconnected IMing mostly died. RSS tried to do it for blogs. Everyone adopted it at first, but eventually content creators came to the realization that you can’t really monetize sending out full-text posts directly in any useful way without a click back to the originating site (mostly defeating the purpose), content aggregators realized that offering people the option to use any front-end they wanted meant that they couldn’t force profitable algorithmic sorts and platform lock-in, and users overwhelmingly wanted social features integrated into their link aggregators (which Google Reader was famously on the cusp of implementing before corporate opted to kill it in favor of pushing people to Google+; that could have potentially led to a very different Internet today if it had been allowed to release). The only big non-enthusiast use of RSS that survives is podcasts, and even those are slowly moving toward proprietary front-ends like Spotify. Even all the way back to pre-Web protocols: IRC was originally a big network of networks where every server could talk to every other server. As the system grew, spam and other problems began to proliferate, and eventually almost all the big servers made the decision to close off into their own internal networks. Now the multi-server architecture of IRC is pretty much only used for load balancing. But there’s two decentralized systems that have survived unscathed: the World Wide Web over HTTP and email over SMTP. Why those two? I believe that it’s because those systems are based on federated identities rather than federated networks. If you have a domain name, you can move the website attached to it to any publicly routable server and it still works. Nobody visiting the website even sees a difference, and nobody linking to your website has to update anything to stay “connected” to your new server. The DNS and URL systems just work and everyone just locates you automatically. The same thing with email: if you switch providers on a domain you control, all the mail still keeps being routed to you. You don’t have to notify anyone that anything has changed on your end, and you still have the same well-known name after the transition. Bluesky’s killer feature is the idea of portable identities for social media. The whole thing just ties back to a domain name: either one that you own or a subdomain you get assigned from a provider. That means that picking a server isn’t something the average person needs to worry about, you can just use the default and easily change later if you want to and your entire identity just moves with you. If the server you’re on evaporates, the worst thing that you lose is your activity, and that’s only if you don’t maintain any backups somewhere else. For most people, you can just point your identity at a different server, upload a backup of your old data, and your followers don’t even know anything has changed. A sufficiently advanced client could probably even automate all of the above steps and move your whole identity elsewhere in one click. Since the base-level object is now a user identity rather than a server, almost all of the problems with ActivityPub’s federation model go away. You don’t deal with blocking bad servers, you just block bad people (optionally using the same sorts of “giant list” mechanisms already available for places like Twitter). You don’t have to deal with your server operator getting themself blacklisted from the rest of the network. You don’t have to deal with your server operator declaring war on some other server operator and suddenly cutting you off from a third of your followers. People just publish their posts to a server of their choice, others can fetch those posts from their server, the server in question can be moved wherever without affecting anything for those other users, and all of the front-end elements like feed algorithms, post display, following lists and block lists, and user interface options could either be handled on the client-side or by your choice of (transferable) server operator. Storage and bandwidth costs for text and (reasonable) images are mostly negligible at scale, and advertising in clients, subscription fees, and/or offering ancillary services like domain registration could easily pay for everything. ActivityPub sounds great to nerds who understand all of this stuff. But it’s too complicated for the average social media user to use, and too volatile for large-scale adoption to take off. AT protocol is just as straightforward to understand as email (“link a website domain if you already have one or just register for a free one on the homepage, and you can easily change in the future”), doesn’t require any special knowledge to utilize, and actually separates someone’s identity and content from the person running the server. Mastodon is 100 tiny Twitters that are somewhat connected together, AT actually lets everyone have their own personal Twitter and connect them all together in a way that most people won’t even notice.
Yodel0914 2y ago
As always, it depends. I'm on a mastodon instance centered around a fairly specific topic, whose members donate (more than) enough to cover the costs of running the instance. Of course, it still relies on the benevolence of the guy who runs and maintains the instance. He actually takes a fee out of the donations each month to pay for his time, but it's a token amount.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

LeoPanthera 2y ago

> users are still at the mercy of the operator Mastodon allows you to be the operator, if you so choose.

ketzo 2y ago
I think OP’s point is that most users don’t choose to do so. Whether because of lack of ability, interest, time, whatever, people would mostly rather just be users.
mschuster91 2y ago
> Mastodon allows you to be the operator, if you so choose. ... and if you forget a critical update or you see it too late, you'll get hacked. Self-hosting anything comes with serious challenges that most people only realize in hindsight.

MBCook 2y ago

I like Mastodon, it’s the only Twitter like thing I use. But I think this just reflects the facts. Centralization works and is highly preferable for many users. Just like in the only big federated service: email. Yes you can run your own. But there are a lot of costs in terms of time/complexity/knowledge/trust to that. Outsourcing it to someone else is really nice. You don’t need one big instance like Twitter was. Having a small handful of big ones works well too. But the dream some people seemed to have where everyone should run their own instance alone or with a few friends was never going to happen.

pessimizer 2y ago
> Centralization works and is highly preferable for many users. I don't think users care about that at all, and if they have it explained to them, hate it. I think the real problem is that we haven't decentralized ownership and decisionmaking, instead we shattered big dictatorships into little fiefdoms, often run by local gangs (as one would expect.) Arguing that federation should automatically solve our problems with social media is like the US argument for "state's rights." You had one problem, now you have 50. This is also exacerbated by the fact that people can't migrate. That would seem like it should be a developer priority to enable competition between instances, but instead people get irritated when asked about it at all. Every post locks you in farther to a particular instance. If people can leave on a whim, bad instances would starve. Instead of people being able to vote with their feet, the politics of mastodon all revolve around punishing other instances for various examples wrongthink by defederating. So now it's little fiefdoms at war with each other, you have to be in the in-crowd of your likely randomly chosen instance to have a say about it, and if you leave you lose everything.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  My experience is that tons of people heard about Mastodon when the first wave of Musk bullshit hit Twitter and they immediately had an allergic reaction to having to pick a server. They don't realise there's no practical difference from email (which they're already using) but somehow the need to pick a server baffles and confuses the average social media user. Instead, everyone seems to be joining Bluesky now, which is also federated but doesn't mention it anywhere so users can just join the main instance. I expect this will cause massive problems in the future when federation will start taking place on a serious scale and the risks of misleading users by using similar usernames on other servers start applying. People don't know the network is federated and there's no easy way to read up about it without diving into dev documents.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    Even the “main instance” on bluesky is a cluster of instances; it’s just not exposed in a way that causes the choice issue. And since you have full account portability, if you ever want to change, it’s at least possible.

Nathan2055 2y ago

This is why I believe that Bluesky and the AT protocol is a significantly more attractive system than Mastodon and ActivityPub. Frankly, we’ve tried the kind of system ActivityPub offers before: a decentralized server network ultimately forming one big system, and the same problems have inevitably popped up every time. XMPP tried to do it for chat. All the big players adopted it and then either realized that the protocol wasn’t complex enough for the features they wanted to offer or that it was much better financially to invest in a closed system. Sometimes both. The big providers split off into their own systems (remember, Google Talk/Hangouts/Chat and Apple iChat/FaceTime both started out as XMPP front-ends) and the dream of interconnected IMing mostly died. RSS tried to do it for blogs. Everyone adopted it at first, but eventually content creators came to the realization that you can’t really monetize sending out full-text posts directly in any useful way without a click back to the originating site (mostly defeating the purpose), content aggregators realized that offering people the option to use any front-end they wanted meant that they couldn’t force profitable algorithmic sorts and platform lock-in, and users overwhelmingly wanted social features integrated into their link aggregators (which Google Reader was famously on the cusp of implementing before corporate opted to kill it in favor of pushing people to Google+; that could have potentially led to a very different Internet today if it had been allowed to release). The only big non-enthusiast use of RSS that survives is podcasts, and even those are slowly moving toward proprietary front-ends like Spotify. Even all the way back to pre-Web protocols: IRC was originally a big network of networks where every server could talk to every other server. As the system grew, spam and other problems began to proliferate, and eventually almost all the big servers made the decision to close off into their own internal networks. Now the multi-server architecture of IRC is pretty much only used for load balancing. But there’s two decentralized systems that have survived unscathed: the World Wide Web over HTTP and email over SMTP. Why those two? I believe that it’s because those systems are based on federated identities rather than federated networks. If you have a domain name, you can move the website attached to it to any publicly routable server and it still works. Nobody visiting the website even sees a difference, and nobody linking to your website has to update anything to stay “connected” to your new server. The DNS and URL systems just work and everyone just locates you automatically. The same thing with email: if you switch providers on a domain you control, all the mail still keeps being routed to you. You don’t have to notify anyone that anything has changed on your end, and you still have the same well-known name after the transition. Bluesky’s killer feature is the idea of portable identities for social media. The whole thing just ties back to a domain name: either one that you own or a subdomain you get assigned from a provider. That means that picking a server isn’t something the average person needs to worry about, you can just use the default and easily change later if you want to and your entire identity just moves with you. If the server you’re on evaporates, the worst thing that you lose is your activity, and that’s only if you don’t maintain any backups somewhere else. For most people, you can just point your identity at a different server, upload a backup of your old data, and your followers don’t even know anything has changed. A sufficiently advanced client could probably even automate all of the above steps and move your whole identity elsewhere in one click. Since the base-level object is now a user identity rather than a server, almost all of the problems with ActivityPub’s federation model go away. You don’t deal with blocking bad servers, you just block bad people (optionally using the same sorts of “giant list” mechanisms already available for places like Twitter). You don’t have to deal with your server operator getting themself blacklisted from the rest of the network. You don’t have to deal with your server operator declaring war on some other server operator and suddenly cutting you off from a third of your followers. People just publish their posts to a server of their choice, others can fetch those posts from their server, the server in question can be moved wherever without affecting anything for those other users, and all of the front-end elements like feed algorithms, post display, following lists and block lists, and user interface options could either be handled on the client-side or by your choice of (transferable) server operator. Storage and bandwidth costs for text and (reasonable) images are mostly negligible at scale, and advertising in clients, subscription fees, and/or offering ancillary services like domain registration could easily pay for everything. ActivityPub sounds great to nerds who understand all of this stuff. But it’s too complicated for the average social media user to use, and too volatile for large-scale adoption to take off. AT protocol is just as straightforward to understand as email (“link a website domain if you already have one or just register for a free one on the homepage, and you can easily change in the future”), doesn’t require any special knowledge to utilize, and actually separates someone’s identity and content from the person running the server. Mastodon is 100 tiny Twitters that are somewhat connected together, AT actually lets everyone have their own personal Twitter and connect them all together in a way that most people won’t even notice.

Yodel0914 2y ago

As always, it depends. I'm on a mastodon instance centered around a fairly specific topic, whose members donate (more than) enough to cover the costs of running the instance. Of course, it still relies on the benevolence of the guy who runs and maintains the instance. He actually takes a fee out of the donations each month to pay for his time, but it's a token amount.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]