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The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

berk.es

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Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#101

Post by turtleyacht »

thrown_22 wrote: post #78
turtleyacht wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kinds of insights for old-school roleplaying (OSR) games. Hard to farm out of books, but very insightful having stumbled upon it. And it's not just needing to be true in an absolute, historical sense, but a useful mechanic to save for later.

If you want a good overview of a bunch of similar ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvZlXaGEzwg&list=PLsOFk2nGmz... A course that goes over how everything we think is bad today is good in a world stuck in the Malthusian trap. Working harder today to have a better life tomorrow just means your children working harder tomorrow to have the same life you have today. The option he didn't talk about at all was how in…

Thank-you. I see it is part of Professor Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. And that is part of a series of 49 books, The Princeton Economic History of the Western World.

Definitely sounds like a reference gold mine.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#102

Post by csande17 »

ekidd wrote: post #97
supermatt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you migrate to another server, don’t you lose all your followers, who will still be following @you@oldserver ?

Nope! That part is pretty neat. It works a bit like "cell-phone number portability" in the US. You set your original account to point at your new account, and you tell your new account about your old account. All of your followers migrate to your new account automatically. Of course, you could still get burnt if your host just disappears one day, because it can't point to your new account. So there's an incentive to…

In order for that migration to happen, the original server needs to cooperate and publish a "this person moved their account" message of some kind, right? I wonder if instance admins ever prevent that from happening if they don't like the server you're moving to.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#103

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

ekidd wrote: post #97
supermatt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you migrate to another server, don’t you lose all your followers, who will still be following @you@oldserver ?

Nope! That part is pretty neat. It works a bit like "cell-phone number portability" in the US. You set your original account to point at your new account, and you tell your new account about your old account. All of your followers migrate to your new account automatically. Of course, you could still get burnt if your host just disappears one day, because it can't point to your new account. So there's an incentive to…

I guess the problem is your username, right? Someone with a distinctive username that is, essentially, their identity has an incentive to squat on that username on multiple instances.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#104

Post by cinntaile »

doener wrote: post #100

I think the author idealizes a bit strongly here. Internet infrastructure is not a garden, so I don't think the metaphor fits. And the exponentially growing requirements for hardware and power consumption are at least a real challenge - although certainly not as extreme as with proof-of-work blockchains.

What does this have to do with blockchains?

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#105

Post by xigoi »

cinntaile wrote: post #104
doener wrote: post #100

I think the author idealizes a bit strongly here. Internet infrastructure is not a garden, so I don't think the metaphor fits. And the exponentially growing requirements for hardware and power consumption are at least a real challenge - although certainly not as extreme as with proof-of-work blockchains.

What does this have to do with blockchains?

That the energy consumption of Mastodon is negligible in comparison.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#106

Post by Kiro »

uneekname wrote: post #4

What has happened with Mastodon recently feels like a great thing for the fediverse. Many of these platforms are still working out their implementation kinks, but they aren't babies anymore. Just when I thought ActivityPub might never catch on, a significant number of people have decided to give it a chance. Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!

My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#107

Post by azangru »

> And so is the case with the fediverse. The six million users would "easily" fit on a mastodon on under thirty (virtual) servers, a very few large PostgreSQL database servers and a single file-server/storage. I know, because I've built and grown such Rails systems, with millions of users (on AWS). Certainly not thousands of servers. Definitely not thousands of database-servers.

> Even if Mastodon were to be rewritten in Rust, tuned, and changed into a backend that can host thousands of users on a single Raspberry-Pi running on solar power, it still is inefficient. For one, because that backend would be even more efficient when employed in a centralized setup. And secondly because there is a lot of network overhead.

Reading these two paragraphs, I was struck by how similar it is to the argument against proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, only with the oppozite conclusions. Look how wasteful, they will say, look how inefficient, and slow, and non-green it is. It's rare to hear someone argue that yes, a technology is wasteful, and it is a good thing.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#108

Post by luckylion »

dsr_ wrote: post #93
yunohn wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you do this, then you'll have total control over your moderation policy. The solution to fragmented servers is not another self hosted disconnected server?

Suppose that everyone who participated ran their own server, population 1. Then choosing to block other servers would be equivalent to blocking other people, which we agree is a good thing. Now someone comes up with an adblock list: subscribe to it, and these servers will not bother you. It's probably not perfect, but it improves your experience a lot. If you don't like it, switch to another, or don't subscribe to an…

Is it public which servers an instance is blocking / what servers they are federating with?

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#109

Post by xigoi »

csande17 wrote: post #15
dustedcodes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the network-wide ban? That makes Mastodon inherently centralised. Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse? Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. It's like saying some person has the final say which RSS feeds all RSS feed readers should ban from the…

> Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. Mastodon servers do often have a "federated timeline" that shows you all the posts from servers your instance knows about. People can also send you unsolicited messages by replying to you or @-mentioning you. > Who is the person who has the final say which server may b…

> People can also send you unsolicited messages by replying to you or @-mentioning you.

You can deal with that by blocking them personally. No need for a guardian angel.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#110

Post by OctopusLupid »

ilyt wrote: post #64
ceejayoz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, just like the guy who poops in the produce section gets banned from all the local grocery stores. Freedom sometimes means no one wants to talk to you.

It quickly becomes "that moderator decided he doesn't like their worldviews and put it on banlist now 100s of servers subscribe to". That kind of list needs pretty good moderation to avoid that. Also, it's not really that effective considering offenders can easily move servers. Hell, it would be all to easy for adversarial group to just server hop and get a bunch of sites blocked purely because the mods of those site…

There is no mechanism currently to subscribe to a blocklist. Some forks allow exporting/importing block lists as CSVs, but that is manual.

Am new admin for a friend-only instance; currently blocking seems to be done via user reports + checking in on the #Fediblock hashtag. It's all manual, and repeated admin work needs to be done per-instance, which is why the article says it's inefficient but a good trade-off (so you can choose the server you align with best).

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