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Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

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Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#41
post #11

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the…

Just to not forget the “past”: Trump was banned from twitter due to inciting violence, see https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

There is an objective truth out there, no reason to return to our echo chambers. Some people are angry at Elon buying twitter because a subjectively good platform might just die in a short time, because everyone who had even an ounce of try at managing a platform knows that “unmoderated free speech” is just shitposting.

Also, I don’t see how death threats, n-words and the like would contribute to any discussion.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#42
I think most of us are missing where things are converging:

1. Easier to do ads as overlay on vid clips than 12 character content 2. User base is getting to trained to expect and WANT short vid clip content 3. Ease and reach of story telling via short vid clips 4. Move off of social graph to AI graph 5. Automated moderation but open where you can see what posts were moderated and why pertaining to the rules of the SM platform.

What we are seeing is the move to Social 2.0.

1. Mark Z has the problem of how to turn FB into instagram and AI graph @. Youtube has smaller problem of just adjusting their feed impl to AI graph 3. Twitter has the most work out of the three in that it's their full imp and infrastructure that has to change to get back to revelance.

True P2P has never ever won in the market of over almost 40 years. But people keep rehashing the same way of doing and structuring P2P both tech wise and business wise and losing.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#43
In theory federated social media seems like a great idea. You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big. It seems like I could join for music and geeky history without being inundated with The Current Thing ragebait culture. I'd try that out!

In practice it's still a desert.

The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there's not much going on once you do.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#44
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is running current 5k servers? Same kind of people. http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?q=&ip=&software=mastodon&r...

And most of those servers stopped registrations when the exodus from Twitter began. One reason, so that communities wouldn't get diluted. The other, it's expensive to run this.

They stopped to throttle, but that's not necessarily permanent. Also for which instances will survive and how they will operate and how they will finance will play out. In the moment there is a lot wild west of people figuring things out and experimenting.

Similar to email - for a long time somebody in a university basement had been running those and now it's google, Microsoft and a bunch of smallers or selfhosted where you can pick the offering you like.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#48

In theory federated social media seems like a great idea. You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big. It seems like I could join for music and geeky history without being inundated with The Current Thing ragebait culture. I'd try that out! In practice it's still a desert. The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there…

I finally joined yesterday to a niche (academic) community that is moving from Twitter. 18k migrants in the 30 hours since it opened up with virtually linear growth. I can search other similar niche communities and they are seeing similar growth.

It's not seeming like much of a desert, and is just starting to benefit from network effects as some of the more known members of the community announce their moves.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most of those servers stopped registrations when the exodus from Twitter began. One reason, so that communities wouldn't get diluted. The other, it's expensive to run this.

I wouldn't say "most". According to that site, of the 4880 instances list, 1909 are close and another ~300 are invite-only. > it's expensive to run this As the hype about Mastodon spiked after Musk bought twitter, I looked at it to see if I could set up an instance, just to experiment. I'm an experienced programmer and systems administrator. After perusing the requirements and installation process, I decided that it…

It took me about 45 minutes last night to install a pleroma server and get it set up. Also as 'just an experiment'. This was on a server that had nginx running on it but not much else.
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