mastodon.ar.al is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
This is my personal fediverse server.

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Aral Balkan

@louis@emacs.ch Sadly, Eugen has allowed himself (and mastodon.social) to become a centre. Mastodon was already built on a Big Web stack, inheriting its scaling characteristics and inherent success criteria so the only hope was for social pressure to keep instances small. And that’s clearly not happening. Instead he’s going for vertical scale. And, sadly, Eugen’s going to discover the hard way (and very soon) that a German not-for-profit cannot compete with Silicon Valley on that.

The downfall of mastodon.social will be content moderation. It is a feature that any user will expect from a "normal" monolithic social network, which he is trying to (badly) emulate. It requires massive amount of capital and even Bay Area Big Tech scraped by, having to outsource a lot of the heavy lifting to badly paid abused workers. Yeah, epic strategic mistake right here.
Mastodon hosted on mastodon.socialMastodonThe original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

@chema @louis @aral "having to outsource" sounds like bullshit. They chose to outsource for savings

@louis@emacs.ch Mastodon.social will be dethroned as the largest instance within roughly a year (and almost overnight) by Tumblr or Mozilla or some other Silicon Valley entrant. At that point Eugen will have zero recourse but to accept it because he’s already made giant instances socially acceptable. In time, he’ll likely be brought into the fold as Tim Berners-Lee was by the Big Web and maybe eventually launch an initiative to Reclaim the Fediverse. It’s not like we haven’t seen this before.

@aral @louis I had expected the big web/tech shift to adopt ActivityPub to have finished by now, esp. with Tumblr after their announcement. That would fold the requirements of social media for a large group of people into Tumblr, making Mastodon and Pixelfed instances superfluous for them.

@aral @ctietze @louis You are having a strong conversation here. I can't blame Eugen for wanting to make #Mastodon more successful. But he probably hit the wall of user interests: It's more promising to make it easy for users to board on than to educate them. Because some don't want to be educated.
On the other hand we probably know: Many educated people already using Mastodon are not easy to socialize with. So it might be Eugen is trying to fight a social problem with algorithms once again.

@louis@emacs.ch The most strategic thing Eugen could have done would’ve been to keep mastodon.social small and make it socially unacceptable for instances to grow beyond a certain size. That would’ve been a poison pill against the infinite growth death cult of Silicon Valley. Maybe not a permanent one but it could have delayed things a little. Instead we’re welcoming them with open arms and equating their interest with success. Like sheep flattered by the gazes of wolves.

Well said. In the words of Homer, "Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter."

@aral @louis

You mean pull up the ladder after you?
But in any event, all that would happen is that the concentrations would themselves be distributed by instance name within a domain and then all the cross talk between and to them would be even more inefficient.

So long as the user has a good experience the majority don't care which instance they're on, and why should they.

@simon_lucy @aral @louis I think that for many this is the beginning of the end of Mastodon. I'm a Twitter refugee and I'm upset with all of this, I imagine what a much older user thinks. This sucks. And this wasn't what I signed for. I hope there's a big wall to keep big tech away but I'm not naive.

@aral @louis Someone needs to draw an updated Mr Block cartoon to show this voluntary servitude dynamic...

@aral @louis diversified horizontal scalability could have been one of Mastodon's strengths, a community of communities providing an interest based alternative to Twitter, Facebook/Meta et al. Due to a few massive instances, what we've got is another Twitter like service, which as you said is unsustainable and probably not what anyone actually needs...

@aral @louis what if there was a pledge of mastodon instances to only grow to a maximum of 150 users (or 1k, whatever) and anybody who is part of the pledge must defederate with any instance larger than this? "The small federation pledge" :)

@aral @louis and joining the federation would involve choosing one of these instances for "normal users" by reading a short blurb (the same size as a toot), seeing an optional image, then a selection of trending toots from that instance so they get a feel of "is this for me".

@aral

I think there is potential in democratisation of fedi culture.

I understand the appeal of a big default instance: if you want to enter fediverse without belonging to a certain community in advance, it seems easier to trust a server which is trusted by most. To trust a small instance you need to do a lot of research on their admins and actual actions, because server rules are only somewhat helpful.

We all know about the opposite: moderating a large instance is a huge, messy and expensive in resources job, which is usually not done properly. Small are much nicer and more humane.

Maybe if users could be treated more like shareholders, who take part in voting on major decisions to limit interactions with other servers, they could feel much safer in small instances?

In a small demicratic instance you would be much more influential in steering its policies than in a large one. Simply maths.

Atm I do not feel very secure as ordinary user. I dont even know what my admin thinks of Threads, and I'm expecting to be surprised. It is not very important yet, but it probably will be soon.

Whereas the feeling of security is important.

@louis

@aral @louis I think it's also useful to think about it from another perspective: the way Mastodon currently works, you have a pretty poor experience when you see posts mainly from other remote instances. It won't load all the posts, you often see no replies (even though they exist) and it barely feels like a working social network. All those issues go away if everyone is in one central instance. Mastodon had years to fix this, and did not.

@aral @louis It is almost suspicious how Mastodon doesn't seem to be built with federation working correctly in mind.

- github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i
- github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i
- github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i

This just makes it more convenient to stick around on larger instances that don't have these kind of problems.

GitHubFetch whole conversation threads · Issue #9409 · mastodon/mastodonBy drequivalent

@aral @louis

The really radical thing would've been a client that also serves as its own server for a single user and was as easy to install as an app.

@aral
This. It could have just been a small vanity instance.
@louis

If that happens, let it be. The ‘verse needs to grow, if it isn’t mastodon.social, well let’s say not even Mastodon for that matter but some other app on the ‘verse, the better for it.

Mastodon hosted on mastodon.socialMastodonThe original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

@arinbasu1 Ideally, we’d just have one instance and it would be run by Google. Hey, a girl can dream…

Goodness Aral! Your wish may just be granted, 🤔

@aral @arinbasu1 I don't get it... How can Eugen not see the problem of having one super node in a decentralized network, when he's the one that brought it up in a first place ? What's his stance on this ?

@emon Well, for a few more days he’s going to be in charge of that super node. And then Mark is.

🤷‍♂️

@arinbasu1

@aral @louis

I am just kind of impressed with how detailed that prediction is.

@aral History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme

@aral
Well, it's not like people didn't try to disabuse him of doing things this way...but oh the overwhelming hubris. Alas, failure is some people's best teacher.
@louis