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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

#261

Post by cratermoon »

zimpenfish wrote: post #239
cratermoon wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was that the original Mastodon? Likely. I didn't investigate alternative implementations. > It'll need a team for coverage of moderation, support, perhaps 24/7 ops - but then anything with a lot of users will, surely? I'm under the impression that the claims of Mastodon include "self-moderation" and, because of its supposed decentralization, 24/7 uptime is not needed for any one instance. I have been imagining it l…

> I'm under the impression that the claims of Mastodon include "self-moderation" That's "the instances moderate themselves", really, not "the users moderate themselves". With large numbers of users, you'll need assigned moderators. > because of its supposed decentralization, 24/7 uptime is not needed for any one instance Not sure where you've got that idea - decentralisation just means that I can talk to other instan…

That's not really "decentralized", that's "distributed". Those are two different topologies.

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

#262

Post by manfre »

cratermoon wrote: post #235
twmiller wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In contrast, I set up IPFS[1] in less than half that time. 1 https://ipfs.tech/

Visited link. Not exactly sure what it is. An OS, a protocol, a file share network?

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

#263

Post by jazzyjackson »

lrvick wrote: post #188
phire wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most users don't care how distributed it is, or what it's architecture looks like. They just want to sign up, and get an out-of-the box experience more or less like twitter.

If Mastodon was fully centralized like Twitter and offered that experience, it would need an immense source of funding, and need ads, and shareholders, and would be losing money rapidly until some billionare bought it out... like Twitter. Mastodon is built so that there is no single point of failure, but that means users have no single point of signup. It is like email, or matrix. Host your own on your own domain for…

isn't the whole point of federated service that I don't have to be on the same server as people I'm following?

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

#264

Post by m3kw9 »

weberer wrote: post #238
m3kw9 wrote: post #91

Imagine you need to choose a server every time you wanted to surf the net and some server you may not see certain things

>Imagine you need to choose a server every time you wanted to surf the net ??? I don't have to imagine. That's exactly what happens when you enter a URL.

That url is the actual content, I meant an intermediary say a proxy

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

#265

Post by moistly »

kragen wrote: post #253
moistly wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years. To the point that it became dangerous to use a Usenet browser that would automatically download & display attachments because extremely illegal content would be displayed. God forbid you were running a server, because that was getting pretty close to “possessing” that shit in your data storage. Unmoderated Usenet…

maybe the problem is that you live in a place where 'extremely illegal content' is a phrase that makes sense to you. if you live somewhere that criminalizes possession of certain information of course you are not going to want access to free speech; at any moment you could come into accidental possession of photos of tiananmen square. but that's a problem created by your local laws, not by unmoderated free speech

Are you telling me that you live where it is legal to possess, let alone publish/distribute/“free speech”, photographs of children being raped?

Because that is literally what happened circa I’m going to say 1992ish on Usenet, and not in overly obscure newsgroups, but also the ordinary default newsgroups.

There is no unmoderated free speech because sick freaks will always do horrible things with their speech if they think they can get away with it.

This is as factual as gravity: unmoderated free speech will never be legal speech.

Further, you don’t want unmoderated free speech. You cannot unsee those photos.

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

#266

Post by [deleted] »

giantrobot wrote: post #166
mozman wrote: post #90

Centralized systems are very dangerous, moderation is a huge problem and has a massive chilling effect. I support civil discourse and disagreements, I actively want to see both sides and not just an echo chamber. We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation. This is especially applicable to politically correct language and culture. Some things are…

> We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation. This presupposes every "belief" and discussion is in good faith. It also presupposes that there's no second order effects from the amplification of "beliefs". A bigot is not interested in learning about whatever it is they're bigoted against. They just want to amplify their message. Trolls and shit p…

[deleted]

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

#267

Post by _djo_ »

unconed wrote: post #254
_djo_ wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are risks in trusting your instance admin, but you can move. Tons has changed on Twitter, including the laying off of half the company including substantial numbers in the Trust & Safety team. I'm seeing people who couldn't have cared less about the US's culture wars talking about leaving Twitter and setting up Mastodon accounts because they're expecting the platform to become nastier, more spammy, less reliabl…

Bluechecks stopped being about verification a long time ago, when it became clear Twitter wouldn't verify people with the wrong kind of opinions, and when they vindictively started to deverify accounts as punishment. That proves it was not about identity verification at all but about the in-group. I have no doubt there is some hysteria going around, but it is entirely unfounded. If anything, you can expect fanatic le…

Oh please, actually notable conservatives and right wingers with impersonation risk have never had much trouble getting verified. All journalists from Fox News, Newsmax, etc were verified as were all GOP politicians.

Those complaining about not being verified were invariably non-notable internet famous personalities, and I saw many of those complaints from people on the left too. Not everything was political bias, some people just were far less notable than they thought they were.

That you consider this to be about ‘fanatical lefties’ and ‘false flags’ shows you’re way too far down the rabbit hole and you’ve lost all perspective. Step back from the culture war nonsense and maybe spend a bit of time offline to touch grass.

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

#268

Post by yanderekko »

Zak wrote: post #257
yanderekko wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that it's a Mastadon technology problem. I'm saying it's a social problem, that the "federation model" only truly works down to the layer of the tech stack which is not federated, which is still most layers. Activists will not be content to merely defederate, they will coordinate to have disfavored Mastadon instances brought down by their hosts and funders.

You could replace "Mastodon instances" with "websites" and see the same effect. Several sites used by hate groups and similar have gone offline indefinitely after Cloudflare refused to provide them DDoS protection.

Yes, that's what I have in mind. It's unclear if just having the various sides of the culture war creating their own social networks is actually a stable equilibrium.

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

#269

Post by gbraad »

whimsicalism wrote: post #154
gbraad wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon can scale, but it costs money. Most instances are hosted by people out of an interest to do good. Servers cost money... And for F/OSS project there aren't big pocket investors ... only funds, grants and hopefully donations.

Yes, when I say scalable, I mean ability to scale without having to spend bucketloads on new servers. Many of the mastodon servers I am seeing pause new registration/break down are at a few thousand members, maybe 8k max. I dont know how Mastodon is implemented, but my intuition is that a well written C++, Rust, or even Java service should be able to handle that many users on a single instance.

Sure, 'ability to scale' (scalability) might be an issue, but if you are using it, you will see that the majority pf people are on other servers or communities, some not even using Mastodon. Mastodon itself is just one of the implementations of the federated protocol that uses ActivityPub. A lot of alternatives exists, like misskey, pleroma, etc.

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

#270

Post by fulafel »

beardedman wrote: post #81

Mastodon is too fragmented to work... well. For example; this tweet: https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1585756076305444864 . Would you really host your email on a server that some dude in rural Canada runs in his spare time? I don't think so. Not just for reliability reasons, but for privacy reasons as well.

It's actually much closer to the email system than this analogy.

Some dude in rural Canada can run a email server in their spare time and nobody thinks the email system is any worse for it.

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