Post AV0boflS8OpdAXFBse by Kagekokoro@bae.st
(DIR) More posts by Kagekokoro@bae.st
(DIR) Post #AV0Og88fyE0HA1hddw by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:04:42Z
4 likes, 5 repeats
The Mastodon centralists are coming out of the woodwork today with, “But it makes onboarding easier!”So what?The goal here isn’t to grow for the purpose of growth. Growth, in and of itself, is meaningless. The goal is to decentralize social media.
(DIR) Post #AV0Og99mBcTgJjE1zs by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:12:47Z
1 likes, 2 repeats
There’s such a thing as growth by subtraction. What I mean by this is that if you want Mastodon to grow, you must be cognizant that Mastodon can’t be all things to all people. To me, the promise of Mastodon is decentralization. Therefore Mastodon shouldn’t be the service for centralists. That is, people who are looking for an exact replica of Twitter—corporate structure and all—should probably not use Mastodon.
(DIR) Post #AV0OgDe3Uz4iEnQGkS by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:21:31Z
1 likes, 3 repeats
History shows that shovelling people into one server and then saying, “Let’s explain to them about decentralization later” doesn’t work. Most people will never care about decentralization. They just want to chat with their friends. This will become more and more true as Mastodon gains popularity. So it’s better to force people into making a choice at the outset. Yes, it’s annoying and causes friction. Many people find making any decision whatsoever to be “difficult”. And that’s fine.
(DIR) Post #AV0OgFCTiUCj3qXH2e by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:31:29Z
1 likes, 5 repeats
People are now conflating centralization with “accessibility”. No, these things are not one and the same. Alt text on images is accessibility. Defaulting everyone onto one server is not accessibility.
(DIR) Post #AV0Org8ltTVxnfFpCK by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:39:04Z
1 likes, 2 repeats
Let me tell you, if centralization of Mastodon is your goal, then basically every microblogging platform that exists right now is blowing it out of the water!You should probably sign up for those services instead.
(DIR) Post #AV0PsTJLBA7aFn8jei by z428@loma.ml
2023-04-25T08:17:07Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@atomicpoet After all these years: The goal should be to make decentralized social media usable for Jane Doe; it already worked well for the crowd that applauds (and understands) the current idea of decentralization. For Jane Doe, all too often the issue isn't about decentralized social media being "better" or "worse". The problem is they don't find their people in and discourse groups in there, and part of that problem is their people actually aren't here yet. Shouldn't be the idea to make the network grow for the sake of making it usable for people for which it currently has no use? Do we want to have a a decentralized network just for the sake of it?
(DIR) Post #AV0PsU4qKY7Qd7MfhI by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:27:06Z
2 likes, 1 repeats
@z428 The goal is to build social media that cannot be bought or sold by one entity or person such as Elon Musk. And how to achieve that? Through decentralization. How do we not achieve that? By centralizing Mastodon onto one server so that it can be acquired by an Elon Musk.
(DIR) Post #AV0VOWpA9TP8Bg861g by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T10:03:25Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Decentralization has nothing to do with idealism. It has everything to do with being clear-eyes and practical. On the contrary, believing that Twitter is the “public square”—despite being owned by surveillance capitalists—that is idealism!
(DIR) Post #AV0XPYnQVO7OV8wAZE by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:58:38Z
1 likes, 3 repeats
I am so scared that mastodon.social could be acquired that I have set up plenty of my own Fediverse servers—on multiple domains—just in case. This isn’t paranoia. It’s the sane thing to do. And if you can, you should probably do it too.
(DIR) Post #AV0XPZUfuaiGfHAhyi by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T09:44:15Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
People seem to think this is about "free and open source" idealism.But I don't care about "free and open source" if the net effect is centralization.Google uses lots of "free and open source". It is a monopoly.
(DIR) Post #AV0boflS8OpdAXFBse by Kagekokoro@bae.st
2023-04-25T11:21:38.876238Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@atomicpoet @atomicpoet uncontrolled growth is also known as cancer"Wildes Wachstum heißt auch Krebs!
(DIR) Post #AV2UAhzU7w3z7xiwOO by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:53:42Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@z428 Your push for centralization ignores the elephant in the room: what does it matter if everyone leaves Twitter when Elon Musk could theoretically buy mastodon.social and now own a significant part of the Fediverse?Is “easy onboarding” worth that very real possibility?
(DIR) Post #AV2UAiebf2xNBUxmUK by yawnbox@disobey.net
2023-04-25T15:26:05Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@atomicpoet @z428 because the protocol allows people to move to a new server. you're saying all this pro federation subjective feelings stuff while using the largest server of them all.
(DIR) Post #AV2UAjNGyygZQ1rS6q by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T17:07:27Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@yawnbox @z428 Yes, I use mastodon.social. I also use peerverse.space, atomicpoet.org, and calckey.social. I’m in multiple places being active. And when I’m on mastodon.social, my purpose is to talk about the importance of the Fediverse.
(DIR) Post #AV2UAjyUkaSZHTHB7w by nhan@pkm.social
2023-04-26T08:36:44Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@atomicpoet @yawnbox @z428 Why don't you leave mastodon.social? Have 1 post like this as an announcement, then move to a smaller server, redirect your followers there, and use that account to answer questions/replies of others. And just stop posting/commenting here.You can make a new account in a new, very small server, and posting about the importance of the Fediverse. Aren't we proud that we can talk to anyone regardless of the servers? You can be a prime example yourself.
(DIR) Post #AV2UAkZ0YpfP6iML2W by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-26T08:38:35Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@nhan @yawnbox @z428 I have a purpose on being on mastodon.social, just like I have a purpose on being on calckey.social. See, the great thing about the Fediverse is that I can be in many places at once.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0M7aNPFrkLHTNo by nhan@pkm.social
2023-04-26T08:50:18Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@atomicpoet @yawnbox @z428 What I'm saying is you can make yourself a good and encouraging example for people to follow: leave when your server is too big. You have a large number of followers, so you can set a very good example of being in many places at once and can still talk to people, that leaving on the Fediverse is easy and by leaving you're contributing to the health of the Fediverse.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0MsjY6y86ZL7s8 by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-26T08:54:02Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@nhan @yawnbox @z428 Leaving on the Fediverse is not easy. In fact, for accounts that have my amount of followers, it’s expensive. There’s the further matter of mastodon.social being the most federated server on the Fediverse. And there’s also the matter of if I were to leave mastodon.social, it would be to relocate on my own server. But I also prefer atomicpoet.org to have another purpose.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0NRTSwl3qJas1Q by arinbasu1@social.arinbasu.online
2023-04-26T08:59:17.210415Z
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I believe that with #Fediverse, one does not have to “leave” any server for anything else. The more the better, after all these are all federated, aren’t they?
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0O2hEYX3hl0b2W by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-26T09:01:36Z
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@arinbasu1 @yawnbox @z428 @nhan It’s not that I don’t want people to join mastodon.social, it’s that I don’t want this to be the default server. If people are choosing to come here after being shown numerous options, then good.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0ODgZhK4Fq9NAW by nhan@pkm.social
2023-04-26T08:50:54Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@atomicpoet @yawnbox @z428 If you're still here or any other big server and telling people to not come there, it's giving a *very* weird vibes, a kind of hypocrisy. The experience of using mastodon.social is *much* better than using a smaller server. Saying it's just as good everywhere else is deceptive and can turn away new users (https://mastodon.social/@nhan/110222576212477948). If you're still here, what people are hearing is "You should not come here but it's totally fine for me to be here because I was here first"
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0OoCNwWu55EX56 by arinbasu1@social.arinbasu.online
2023-04-26T09:13:37.092310Z
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This is merely a thought “experiment”, how might it be if we had something like “calckey.social” back in this time last year, when many people were leaving twitter in search of better alternatives, and we had people coming over to Mastodon but then ended up either not using or leaving because some of them found Mastodon to be confusing to use, and anytime people brought up the issue of Fediverse, these users would say Fediverse is too confusing (conflating Fediverse with Mastodon). In hindsight, seems to me that if they discovered the power of #Fediverse with something like calckey.social, they would have stayed on. Sadly, although there was pleroma/misskey/calckey/foundkey, none of these gained the kind of user base that’d have been helpful to “spread” the fediverse around, 🙂 Mastodon is great but there is definitely room for others.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0PW9kVgwHPndb6 by eshep@social.trom.tf
2023-04-26T13:02:32Z
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I try to encourage every new fediverse visitor to consider both the interface and mission statement (ideals/rules) before finally settling down somewhere. That poor initial experience combined with misunderstanding, gives people a bad view of the fediverse as a whole. I really try my best to inform every newcomer that they will still be able to interact with anyone from other instances no matter where they decide to hang their hat. That interoperability seems to be the hardest part for newcomers to understand. There's not much they have to relate that concept to outside of email or mobile phone provider.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0QDl8OZOSeCSYq by z428@loma.ml
2023-04-26T13:18:57Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@eshep The problem gets worse however in what isn't visible at first sight: Talking e-mail as the "classic" decentralized system, yes, there used to be a lot of different providers and clients and user interfaces but in the end you could be reasonably sure that, at the very end, sending, receiving and displaying mails would work well for all of these and between all of these. In 2020s Fediverse, things are slightly more ... complicated, knowing that how federation, commenting, notifications, ... works will more or less massively depend on which platform you are on and which platforms your contacts use. Like, I repeatedly am experiencing interesting issues (as in lost comments, lost messages, lost notifications when communicating between pixelfed and friendica). This is something you only notice once you've been into things for a while, and at this point reverting a change and moving elsewhere will become more difficult. (We're not talking about different instances blocking each other more or less intransparently now.) Even at this very "high-level" point of view, there's loads of room for usability improvements. 🙂️@atomicpoet @yawnbox @arinbasu1 @nhan
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0QqOojTiOUHJmy by skotchygut@social.tummyacid.net
2023-04-26T13:28:48.740022Z
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@z428 @yawnbox @atomicpoet @nhan @arinbasu1 @eshep good thing email always works %100 of the time and doesn’t suffer from spam filters. I never have to deal with tickets where a user claims he/she never got their confirmation email despite my server logs showing it delivered. Corporate run networks are entirely transparent about moderation and the appeals process is widely known to be robust and fair. /sgive me a break
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0RU6R7EmNcr1fs by z428@loma.ml
2023-04-26T13:39:30Z
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@skotchygut I've been doing that stuff (handling corporate mail for a mid-sized organization) since the late 1990s and yes, there's a load of things that just could break here as well. That's why I didn't write "it works 100%" but rather "you can be reasonably sure it works" (and I _mean_ exactly that). 😉️ With e-mail I've seen interesting effects too, but all these years I rarely stumbled across situations where things got completely lost and no one had a clue where or how.@atomicpoet @yawnbox @eshep @arinbasu1 @nhan
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0S4cFMRcCrwBaS by skotchygut@social.tummyacid.net
2023-04-26T13:45:07.746367Z
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@z428 @yawnbox @atomicpoet @nhan @arinbasu1 @eshep I wish I shared your experience. Where do you find these users who are not clueless?I can say in my ~6 months of running my own pleroma instance as a hobby that I have not noticed any trouble in my message delivery.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0SbaGmodr7MVyS by z428@loma.ml
2023-04-26T18:13:50Z
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@skotchygut There never was a shortage in clueless users over here too. Maybe our load wasn't that heavy though, just had around 7..9k of messages per day, most of them (document / drawing management for civil engineering) with larger documents, xls sheets, ... attached. Even this way, real serious issues (as in mails lost without being able to figure out where they ended up) have been rare, even knowing a lot of the external participants were somewhat low-tech back then, utilized mail systems such as provided by their dialup ISPs, or GMX / Yahoo in worst cases. Content blocking always was an issue, but it rarely managed to have messages lost. And except for a very small couple of contacts sending the dreaded winmail.dat stuff, we never saw messages we weren't unable to read or handle correctly.On the Fediverse (okay, taken I don't run my own instance) I've seen all too often situations where a comment on a post, or a comment on a comment on a post, would not show up on the target system, in some cases however be visible to others on other system (unless posted privately) and often spent hours in communicating with various actors (including instance admins and partially developers) to learn what went wrong. Same, until just a while ago, Friendica wasn't able to render Mastodon polls so these posts in Friendica would just show up as text posts and unless the textual part of it suggested there might be more you wouldn't even notice you're missing something. Or, in example, handling pictures: I can use pixelfed and Friendica to post messages with up to ten (pixelfed) or unlimited (? Friendica) amount of images attached but Mastodon generally will only display four of them, again without leaving a hint that there's more. Or pixelfed stories (which are absolutely unusable outside the pixelfed world). E-mail had a lot of mess in terms of formats and structures too but I never experienced this kind of chaos with e-mail throughout all these years, the worst to happen in this really was TNEF / winmail.dat or a message claiming to please install an HTML compliant mail client to read the content. I've never seen, in example, a message just partially rendered on some system. This is what is hard to impossible to explain to new users without driving them away (and it sheds a difficult light on all these images claiming the Fediverse is great because everything connects to everything...).@atomicpoet @yawnbox @eshep @arinbasu1 @nhan
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0T8YIDBfVMmqMS by skotchygut@social.tummyacid.net
2023-04-26T18:32:59.461184Z
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@z428 @yawnbox @atomicpoet @nhan @arinbasu1 @eshep fair points, all of them. I suggest much of this has to do with Mastodon being a flagship product but not always meeting the bar when it comes to interoperability. I will not speculate on reasons for that. It should be noted that I run pleroma, not mastodon.For what it is worth I don’t do a lot of media heavy posting aside from Simpsons screenshots as snarky replies. They always seem to get thru. I just don’t have many followers so the videos I do post are not widely viewed. I can hotlink them to my mother in an SMS message and she can always see them so that’s my biggest use case covered.Dropping 12 images into a post that may exceed 50mb is going to be a lot to process for any system. I am not familiar with Pixelfed as a user but I would assume they must offer a crazy amount of server side processing to serve low resolution previews and follow up with high resolution on request. I find without an algorithm to keep everyone’s funnel topped off the content on Activity Pub is very bursty. The federated nature does exponentially expand bandwidth with scale because each activity must be published among each instance. Yes this means things can be undefined while the system reaches equilibrium and centralization can solve that. I just don’t think that benefit is worth the drawbacks of a centralized ecosystem over all. Lack of speed can always be overcome, in the worst case, by patience.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0Tp5k3DNdIgofQ by z428@loma.ml
2023-04-26T18:43:59Z
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@skotchygut Ah no, I'm not really suggesting a centralized system here, and I'm on the Fediverse after all because most likely it's the best we have at the moment. But then again, there has been plenty of well-worded criticism on the shortcomings of ActivityPub (like this one https://medium.com/@denschub/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later-194fe591e900 ). What bothers me a bit is: There's a lot of open aspects - in terms of standards quality / strictness (extensibility is evil and might be opposite to standardization?), handling technical issues (storage, bandwidth, ...) and so forth. And, which is worse: I think in order to address such issues (https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-stampede/), the current decentralization is not really able to handle that well because decentralization means responsibility for handling these aspects is spread out all across a plethora of smaller and smallest actors who have neither incentives nor (at least in some cases) motivations to share such issues in a joint effort. This is a bit concerning (even though at this point we're way deeper than "just" user interface glitches or inconveniences in system communication. But I still feel the Fediverse has quite some way to go here, and maybe ... also in a way of getting organized better, of trying to figure out how to handle bandwidth, storage, ... in a sane way globally, not just limited to particular instances.@atomicpoet @yawnbox @eshep @arinbasu1 @nhan
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0USnMQyRcRGWYK by skotchygut@social.tummyacid.net
2023-04-26T18:50:44.907659Z
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@z428 @yawnbox @atomicpoet @nhan @arinbasu1 @eshep all of those valid reasons indicate why it’s going to be hard to get it right. Nothing worth the effort is ever easy. I don’t see any other option though. Every community is different and must enforce it’s own standards. We cannot continue to allow the very richest and powerful to retain so much control.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0UzlNrLTGggqwK by z428@loma.ml
2023-04-26T18:56:21Z
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@skotchygut Well, my personal opinion here is maybe too optimistic, yet: When I joined the FLOSS bandwagon in the 1990s, with (desktop) Linux gaining speed and projects such as GNOME and KDE emerging, there was an interesting spirit in that whole community, something like "by collaboration rather than competition we'd even be able to beat competitors like Microsoft". And ... in a way I think it will require that mindset and it will fail without it. 😔 And I wonder where's the actual problem, to be honest. Why not come up with a _strict_ standard, a standard that is not extensible, a standard that tries to get it right rather than being as loosely-defined as somehow possible for the sake of getting something done that is ready for end-users, ready to beat the ____ out of Twitter and Facebook literally by tomorrow because it's a joint effort by the brightest and most inspired minds out there? Why not doing this instead of coming up with yet another fork of a fork of a predominant platform just because we disagree with the original maintainer about post length or that wording on the "Toot" button? Or the other way 'round: What could be a ... motivation or driver to actually _get_ the community together to sort these things out? For where we are now (and loosely getting back to the root of this post), I guess it's just a matter of time for some shady actor to throw up a solution that works for users, provides a stable environment, has a predictable behaviour and will leave the Fediverse again where it used to be before Mastodon and Musks Twitter: A cool playground for tech-savvy and privacy-aware people yet not something of interest to many others. That would be sad. But right now I don't at all see us being "organized" enough to avoid that.😔@atomicpoet @yawnbox @eshep @arinbasu1 @nhan
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0VZDG3hZ2dHAC8 by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-26T19:07:30Z
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@z428 The approach your talking about has already been tried. That’s the approach Diaspora took. Diaspora failed. And this is because the approach that you’re talking about doesn’t allow for new, novel, and innovative approaches to social media. People don’t want mere clones. They want something fresh and new.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0W3hQi5WZBXViK by z428@loma.ml
2023-04-26T19:13:25Z
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@atomicpoet Who is "people" in this case? Isn't that one of the crucial issues in discussion here after all - people _not_ wanting merely something fresh and new but actually something that works in a reliable and predictable manner? Maybe once again this is a mismatch between tech and non-tech folks, and part of the problem between the "product thinkers" and the "tinkerers".😶(And no - it's not the approach Diaspora took. I'd dare to say this is an approach that hasn't been tried so far, mostly because - at least by now - it seems if there's one thing people are mostly unable to, then it's uniting behind _one_ common idea and trying to make that as good as possible by finding a consensus on how it should work. Ever checked how many of these open social networks started all along with or shortly after Diaspora? And in the end, most of them were, most of them still are clones by today. pixelfed is mostly a distributed Instagram clone. Mastodon is a federated Twitter clone. And so forth. Care to name _any_ service in the current Fediverse that is completely unique from what it does - its federated nature aside for a moment? Most of them are even more explicitely labeled as such - a "decentralized version of <you-name-it>".)
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0WcRLXsSIvnFrc by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-26T19:25:19Z
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@z428 I don’t know where you’re hanging out, but I’m seeing lots of innovation on the Fediverse. Misskey has a radically different feature set from everything else. Bonfire is likewise excellent. As slow as Mastodon is in development sometimes, the fact I can edit my posts, then track those edits is fantastic. None of this would be possible with Dennis Schubert’s approach to development. Diaspora once had 650,000 accounts. Hardly any are active anymore. Why is that?
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0XDJ8TMs9H2hKS by z428@loma.ml
2023-04-26T19:33:26Z
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@atomicpoet Ok, if Misskey and Bonfire (both are good platforms) are "innovations", we don't need to any further discuss that I guess. Editable posts have been around in other platforms (open ones too) for quite a while as well... .As for Diaspora. The core issue I see here is that essentially at some point things didn't move forth anymore because developers didn't care about working on / contributing to Diaspora anymore. It's always much more enticing to start something anew than working on an "old" platform (as in "a platform built and driven by someone else"). And this is one of my bigger gripes with all this situation.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q0XjvBDSJmQIkAC by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-26T19:49:36Z
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@z428 Friendica never had the install base that Diaspora had. It never had the funding either. Or even the press. And yet, despite initially being made in 2010, Friendica has enthusiasm *right now* because they have a fundamentally different approach to protocols from Diaspora. Friendica will talk to anyone. Friendica uses its own protocol, DRFN. But it also uses Diaspora and ActivityPub. Friendica is happy to talk to everyone. Diaspora is not. That’s the difference.
(DIR) Post #AV3Q9xSkuYjAAIlHUG by MarioTorre@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:17:34Z
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@atomicpoet But I think making onboarding easier is about accessibility more than growth. I don’t much see the issue in using mastodon.social, there’s strength in unity, and the protocol makes it rather simple to migrate if we ever need to.
(DIR) Post #AV3QAFzg0tkxdcIpIe by randulo@fosstodon.org
2023-04-25T08:10:40Z
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@atomicpoet Weren't mastodon.social registrations suspended for a while a few months ago?
(DIR) Post #AV3QAGlBAHko0wWlLE by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:13:16Z
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@randulo Yeah, because it couldn’t handle more users.
(DIR) Post #AV3QOZSkQR3C4dj4G8 by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:37:26Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
Centralization does not make Mastodon “accessible” to so-called “regular people”. Centralization turns Mastodon into Tribel, Hive, and Post. Centralization takes everything unique about Mastodon and destroys it.
(DIR) Post #AV3QV8ly3ZFzK6qfDs by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:29:11Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@MarioTorre The protocol, as Mastodon uses it, does not make it simple. While people can migrate their social graph, they cannot migrate their posts. Let’s not pretend that Mastodon has no lock-in.
(DIR) Post #AV3QV9OxiaRtH35o0G by MarioTorre@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:39:02Z
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@atomicpoet I think this is better solved by making migration easier, anyway the lock-in is valid regardless of the instance in use, and is more likely to migrate off from a smaller instance than one with some organisation behind
(DIR) Post #AV3QVA31JeUXHHpnRQ by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:42:44Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@MarioTorre “Making migration easier” sounds good—but have you looked at Mastodon’s road map? That’s not a priority right now, and hand waving this problem as an eventuality doesn’t change the fact that centralization destroys what Mastodon aims to do. Which is to decentralize social media.
(DIR) Post #AV3QYG5pIQoqtackTI by pgcd@mastodon.online
2023-04-25T08:37:27Z
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@atomicpoet sane defaults are one of the good things of software. I don't see why there shouldn't be a sane default for server selection, rather than throwing newcomers in the deepend and letting nature take its course, unless it's a rather Social Darwinist approach to "we want only smart and dedicated people here", which might be sensible given the alternative, but has consequences.
(DIR) Post #AV3QcBl1MF9obilZuy by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:46:01Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@pgcd Defaulting to one server is not a sane default, it’s literally the worst default if the goal is social media decentralization. Forcing users to make a choice isn’t the “deep end”, it’s the bare minimum for accomplishing social media decentralization.
(DIR) Post #AV3QflAs8Q9NJtYqOW by MarioTorre@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:46:30Z
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@atomicpoet It’s open source :)
(DIR) Post #AV3QhnNIvMxgiwLYGW by bencurthoys@universeodon.com
2023-04-25T08:33:21Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@atomicpoet I would be fine with people being assigned to a default server to ease account creation if that server were read only. You would be able to follow people, get a feel for what other servers were like, but it would also be clear that it was for temporary use only, and you'd have to move to a "proper" federated server when you wanted to start participating, posting, and replying.
(DIR) Post #AV3QidNRa5yG0QoOhc by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:47:31Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@bencurthoys I agree with the “read only” approach to a default server. At least then people can try before they buy.
(DIR) Post #AV3QjleuH9X3yrWKdk by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:48:40Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@MarioTorre So what?
(DIR) Post #AV3QtDgFSenRUieg5Y by z428@loma.ml
2023-04-25T08:35:51Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@atomicpoet No. We solve that by providing an easy onboarding for users to get here in the first place (instead of giving up immediately and staying where Musk and friends already are), by providing them with real incentives to move to different instances (like, "if you're a photographer, photog.social might be interesting for you"; "if you're into metal music. metalhead.club might be interesting for you", "if you live in Dresden, dresden.network could be your crowd", ... - mere "move to a small server to prevent servers from becoming too big" is a pointless incentive for most people), and by making this migration as seamless and straightforward as somewhat possible (post migration, anyone?). On a closer look, maybe the issue you're outlining, too, is addressed way better by more "sane" approaches of decentralization, like not binding accounts to individual instances all too much (talking Hubzilla / nomadic identities).
(DIR) Post #AV3QxTIzJJ3R71npU8 by pgcd@mastodon.online
2023-04-25T08:49:50Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@atomicpoet "defaulting to one server is not a sane default", yep. That's why I used "sane default" instead of "defaulting to one server".In this case, and IMHO, "sane default" would mean "here's a big instance, and here's a local instance, and if you enter your interests here's a couple instances that might work for you".That would be a sane default, vs the three or two hundred pages that are currently offered.(And there could *still* be the million instances, just below that)
(DIR) Post #AV3QxgKsrZINWfn1kG by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:54:38Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@pgcd Yes, that would be better.
(DIR) Post #AV3R0xNNxoupFDWOKO by MarioTorre@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T08:55:56Z
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@atomicpoet If anyone is in need of a feature that’s not on the roadmap they can contribute it, or advocate for it and find someone who can do it. I don’t see all the problems you mentioned tbh, but that’s just my opinion of course.
(DIR) Post #AV3R0y4HOLE7OFaeBc by atomicpoet@mastodon.social
2023-04-25T09:02:15Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@MarioTorre Open source doesn’t matter if there’s a BDFL who controls both the development of the mainline server software and its biggest server.