Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter. Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others. That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.
Not that I necessarily want this feature implemented or that this is a good idea, but I can foresee some large Mastodon instances asking for X dollars a month to put a blue check mark in front of your name.
Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
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Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an error to treat the Fediverse as you would treat Twitter, where there is a singular platform in some way external to its users. Fediverse is a mesh network with single-user instances being feasible. If a single node has problems scaling, split it up. If a whole network has problems scaling, add more nodes. Fediverse is not yet at levels where the whole network is congested, either.
This makes the network congestion exponentially worse. It’s not scalable.
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#43It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling. Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if 100 mil users want to move? Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every time Justin Bieber tweeted?
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#44It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling. Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if 100 mil users want to move? Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every time Justin Bieber tweeted?
I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding c…
Keep in mind that Torrents tend to be much larger than your average Tweet/Toot/Whatever and that the interconnects between the servers need to transport only those messages for which there are subscribers, something that could be optimized for (you really only need to transport each message once per sender if there are subscribers, not once per subscriber).
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that I necessarily want this feature implemented or that this is a good idea, but I can foresee some large Mastodon instances asking for X dollars a month to put a blue check mark in front of your name.
There are already badges that people have. For example, on brands.town, Fox News has a verified badge [0]. [0]: https://brands.town/@FoxNews
Actual verification happens via proving that you control a website that links back to your Mastodon profile - see e.g. https://opensource.com/article/22/11/verified-mastodon-websi...
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The average person is dying to pay to have the privilege of an extra job moderating and administrating their own social feed! This is a bulletproof plan that really understands consumer behavior.
Who says unpaid? Make your friends buy you dinner or throw some cash your way. One of the benefits of the fediverse is that you can experiment with new payment models.
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. Didn't you just describe Twitter?
Nobody knows what the hell is going on with MuskBird, but when it was still Twitter there was a two-sided terms of service, under which Twitter offered its users concrete, enumerated benefits. Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.
The model does make it difficult for an idiot to take over _the whole thing_ and ruin it, though.
Your position as a user on any given Mastodon instance is worse than it was on pre-Musk Twitter, undoubtedly (post-Musk it just has a CEO ruling by fiat, which I would argue is a worse situation than you have on most Mastodon instances), but it's unclear that your position as a user of Mastodon writ large is.
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that I necessarily want this feature implemented or that this is a good idea, but I can foresee some large Mastodon instances asking for X dollars a month to put a blue check mark in front of your name.
There are already badges that people have. For example, on brands.town, Fox News has a verified badge [0]. [0]: https://brands.town/@FoxNews
The "verified badge" on mastodon is just a satirical emoji.
Mastodon does have a mechanism for instances vouching for their users actually having control of a webpage (using rel=me links). Those are the links in green boxes here: https://hachyderm.io/@nova (It doesn't cost anything, and isn't exclusive to famous people).
I assume the person I'm replying to is aware of all of this... but for everyone else...
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#49Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter. Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others. That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.
I mean, it depends what you mean by 'replace'. Mastodon is already filling many of the functions that twitter filled for millions of people. Will it be a like-for-like replacement for Twitter? Of course not; I don't think anyone's saying that. But as Twitter crumbles, it's a place for many Twitter users to go which will work for many purposes. > the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to atte…
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a nice thought, but reality is always different. A really popular person might have many millions of followers on tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes. That person then boosts a post from another server and they have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other nodes will start querying that server about that post or image. You can say that a single user should not have that many followers, however the roo…
Yes, and we're already seeing it e.g. with https://mas.to getting hugged to death because of pg joining it. If anything, it can be treated as a technological problem, solvable e.g. by (theorizing now) splitting a single instance over a series of machines, or a social problem, by (not theorizing anymore) a famous enough person hosting their own instance as already suggested several times on the Fediverse. The Fedivers…
They've had years to get this right. This is their moment to shine and they're blowing it.