actually the thing about mastodon that keeps hitting me is that it's a return to the governance model of the internet of the 90s, which is the "local dictator", with a single admin or a small mod team who are the sole owners and operators of a site. and like, oh right, anybody who's only used, say, twitter and facebook and youtube and tumblr and myspace and so forth and so on would have had absolutely no exposure to, because all major social media platforms online for the past ten years or so have been huge corporate monoliths (or wannabe huge corporate monoliths). getting mad at brad on livejournal was a very different thing than getting mad at jack on twitter or david karp on tumblr, because lj was brad's site in a way that was very different from jack being CEO of twitter
@xax Now imagine a world where everyone has their own Mastodon instance – instances of one. (Let’s say it was trivial to get one and you didn’t have to have any technical knowledge.) So the “local dictator" becomes you. And anyone is free to follow (or block, etc.) your instance as they see fit. That’s the future I want to live in :)
@bob Indeed, you can see how different groups can be modelled by instances of many (e.g., neighbourhoods, local communities, etc.). One transitionary mechanism would be seamless account migration (imagine starting out with an account on a community instance and then seamlessly being able to convert that to your own instance in under 30 seconds).
The solution is to do something like Hubzilla, where there is a separate instance identifier as a long random string. That means identifying the instance doesn't depend on its domain name.
@bob
Indeed it is.
@aeris explained though that it would be very difficult technically to have easy instance migration because of the followers, like you said.
I'm not sure how your interesting reference to Hubzilla would work there, though?
@aral
I understand and approve this mix of instance sizes better than your promotion of individual instances only, I must say.
@bob This is something I hope we will be able to support the development of in the near future. Watch this space ;)
This is almost trivial for your normal social network. For Hubzilla it's a bit harder as the project is primarily a decentralised CMS and cloud storage resource with distributed access control and decentralised social networking is just icing on the cake. Cloning and syncing a lot of files (some of which may be huge media files or zipped repositories) puts a lot of additional burdens on the sync tools.
@maiyannah @mike That’s awesome to hear :)
In the near future I think there will continue to be a mixture of single user instances and larger instances with maybe hundreds or thousands of people using them (careful use of language there). There are still advantages, economic and social, to pooling resources as a collective.