Post AV39hMYCxQ0EJFeeR6 by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
(DIR) More posts by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
(DIR) Post #AV2t9PRo5AWmBIRroe by ludovic@chabant.social
2023-04-25T21:09:12Z
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Haha people on Mastodon are already talking about defederating the biggest server because, I don’t know, “reasons”. These FOSS people are funny when they sabotage themselves like this.
(DIR) Post #AV2t9QQmQTIhEOyYr2 by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
2023-04-26T13:45:07.228Z
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@ludovic@chabant.social tbh this says more about the projects leadership than anything. A lot of people (IMO rightly) think that it's harmful for a decentralized social network to have a central flagship instance, and have been saying so for years. Yet those servers continue growing, and with that, continue getting worse in moderation quality, while the leadership is holding their hands over their ears, not listening to what others are saying.At some point, federating with the big servers is annoying enough that you just decide to defederate. I honestly don't see it as a sabotage, but rather a response to a bad action by the leadership.
(DIR) Post #AV34SYYxVyxLRx7tke by ludovic@chabant.social
2023-04-26T15:38:03Z
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@ignaloidas IMHO it has to do with the project's goals. To me, the goal is the fediverse (or something like it) becoming the major protocol for microblogging/public social networking. This will require big corps like MS/FB/etc to eventually adopt it and make big, giant instances. Otherwise, it's like trying to make email ubiquitous without Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. If the only way to deal with a bad actor is to defederate their instance, then ActivityPub has failed.
(DIR) Post #AV34SclVtFNKU31ysK by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
2023-04-26T15:51:59.563Z
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@ludovic@chabant.social Email was already ubiquitous before Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and others. They only came to capture the market by offering a better (at the time) product. Hell, most ISP's offered their own e-mail services, included with the subscription in the early days. You really don't need big companies for something to become big. You just need a lot of offerings.As for defederation, it's not that you need it to deal with a bad actor - but if you have a source of bad actors, it is the right move. Think of it like spam blacklists - if some server frequently has users that send a bunch of it, eventually other servers will block it. And this is something that big instances right now aren't able to keep a hold on - they routinely let bad actors live there for days. This is unlike what big email services are like - they are pretty damn good at detecting and disabling bad actors - in a large part because their reputation depends on them not being a source of spam.Anyways, I don't understand the "big tech" fetishism - MS/FB/etc don't need to adopt it - I would actually prefer if they didn't. It's not like people can't use it without them. Yes, there are things that should be improved in general, but nothing that requires big monoliths to stomp everyone else around. Small servers are great, and I think that should be how the majority of people access fediverse.
(DIR) Post #AV34Se3z43kCVcgFIu by ludovic@chabant.social
2023-04-26T15:40:14Z
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@ignaloidas And this goes a bit further: it looks to me like a lot of people around here do NOT want big instances by the big corps, and generally don't want big instances at all. This feels like a form of gatekeeping to me. These people don't want the Fediverse to grow, they want to keep it as fringe culture. And this in terms ties into how the Fediverse doesn't know what it is, between "themed" forums or open social network. There's a disconnect.
(DIR) Post #AV34ShhnWUNFnyKaHI by ludovic@chabant.social
2023-04-26T15:45:42Z
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@ignaloidas Last point: I don't think moderation issues depend on an instance's size. They depend on the governance of the instance. We have seen medium sized instances go down with a lot more drama because in practice they are moderated by a single random person you know only from their nickname, and who does this on their free time. I've seen early 2000s forums with better admin teams than most Mastodon instances.
(DIR) Post #AV35H3oTbKkoqlT088 by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
2023-04-26T16:01:07.897Z
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@ludovic@chabant.social Oh, moderation of course is highly variable between instances. But it still depends on the size. Once you grow beyond maybe 100 active people, you can no longer do moderation "as a hobby", you now need to actively take time to do it. At maybe ten thousand, it can become a full time job - and that's bad. I think you've heard of the horror stories from facebook moderators, the job is not a nice one. If you have even more users, now you have to have multiple full-time paid moderators, or you won't be able to moderate the server properly anymore. And right now, the big instances don't have enough full time moderators.
(DIR) Post #AV38rfo07jHSy7OVaS by ludovic@chabant.social
2023-04-26T16:23:34Z
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@ignaloidas Yep so that's it: how big can the fediverse get on <100 user instances? How much federation workload does that take, and can the network and servers handle it? What does that mean for onboarding newbies and non-tech savvy people? How fragmented does information become? How far (or not) does information go?There are a LOT of difficult questions that rise from wanting to keep instances small for... no good reason imho.
(DIR) Post #AV38rgbd9CynS2c8wa by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
2023-04-26T16:41:19.073Z
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@ludovic@chabant.social I've calculated, and at least for my country, every IT capable person spinning up an instance with 100 users would cover the country. Though of course there are services that allow less tech-savvy people to spin them up as well, and that's great.Federation workload isn't that big, since people mostly separate out into small cliques, the hardest thing to handle are celebrities, but I think it would be expected that they would have their own instances that are fit for sending their posts out for loads of followers. Receiving posts isn't that much load while you're small, if you have 100 users that each receive 10 posts (that's a ton) per minute to their timeline, without any overlap (unrealistic because cliques largely follow server boundries), you get ~17 incoming posts per second, which isn't that horrible to handle, and the scenario is about as bad as you can imagine for the usecase.The onboarding right now is one of the hardest questions, I do agree. But it's not unsolvable. There could be websites listing a bunch of small-ish servers accepting people. But I also think that word of mouth is very powerful, and that face-to-face recommendations for a server are a lot better than searching "best mastodon server to join".As far as fragmentation and information travel - honestly, this isn't any different from the monolithic social networks, besides recommendations. But even traditional social networks largely base recommendations on the actions of your contacts, and those can be federated.Keeping the instances small has one good reason - you're talking to a human, not a faceless machine when you need help. And that is extremely important for many people, especially the most vulnerable ones. Loosing that, just so more people can join, would be a definite downgrade of user experience here.
(DIR) Post #AV39YZlqR856hiqLWi by ludovic@chabant.social
2023-04-26T16:18:48Z
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@ignaloidas In Canada we've got 3 main ISPs. If they offered a Fediverse account in addition to email, that would mean instances with at the very least a million people. And we're complaining about mastodon.social, which is currently at 200k people?
(DIR) Post #AV39YaPC4pYaflFlrM by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
2023-04-26T16:49:04.930Z
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@ludovic@chabant.social tbh I wouldn't see ISP's offering social network services. A social network is a bit different to a communications protocol IMO.
(DIR) Post #AV39YbWfuV8S9FlG9w by ludovic@chabant.social
2023-04-26T16:20:29Z
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@ignaloidas And I might have missed something but I haven't seen mastodon.social as "a source of bad actors". Could it have bad actors in the future? For sure! It probably has some right now! But this isn't like email spam. You don't block Gmail because some bad people are sending email from it. There ARE neo-nazi podcasts using Gmail for their emails. It's not the same. You just block them and their content.
(DIR) Post #AV39hMYCxQ0EJFeeR6 by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
2023-04-26T16:50:42.094Z
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@ludovic@chabant.social A pub has a different expectations of acceptable behavior than what a mail carrier considers acceptable behavior.