Mastodon 2.5 released

Release #100.

This is a good read for anyone curious what this is all about, and contains a roadmap for an "instance-of-one" via Masto.host:

https://laurakalbag.com/what-is-mastodon-and-why-should-i-us...

The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network instead of paying someone else much less to do it." It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor.

For instance, the solution to content moderation and harassment is:

> “Mastodon comes with effective anti-abuse tools to help protect yourself. Thanks to the network’s spread out and independent nature there are more moderators who you can approach for personal help, and servers with strict codes of conduct.”

The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run. But that abstraction is the solution to everything in a federated system: spread out power so it isn't corruptible.

As a libertarian this is really attractive to me, but in our current system, politically, it's completely infeasible and more than that just a little actively not wanted. People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved. Governing is a pain in the ass.

I can respect that Mastodon is philosophically consistent: if you want to really control your communications, you need to put in the effort. I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already.

Please: CMV.

> It's like they want it to fail.

This is software -- if you have a better idea create your own implementation of the underlying protocol:

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

I tried to grunt in Mastodon and accidentally recompiled it.