161–170 of 257 posts
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Which will then need to federate to most other instances, causing an unmanagable load?
Is the problem of scale a) broadcasting the one person that millions of people want to see the tweets of or b) millions of people recieving the tweets of one person?
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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 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…
What will happen is the same thing that happened to web servers and email servers. Businesses will pop up to run your instance for you.
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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.
You are aware that an entire generation of Internet forums operated (and still operate) this way, right? Big forums had big hosting costs and required donations from members, had issues with spam, had to source volunteer moderators from the community, etc., just like big Mastodon instances today. Small forums had few of those issues because the scale was smaller. The problem was not that nobody wanted to run a small…
And yet many of them died or, better put, most of the new forums were never born nowadays because communities moved to centralized, managed solutions (Facebook, Telegram, Discord, Slack etc)
The discussions how a decentralized system like Mastodon won't work reminds me of the early days of networks. People were saying the same thing about the web and the internet and claiming CompuServe and AOL would dominate. Twitter is like CompuServe and AOL, Mastodon is like the internet. One based on proprietary systems, the other based on open standards like ActivityPub. History showed that centralization is ultima…
> Mastodon is like the internet Which is why I believe that once the fediverse has fractured along ideological lines, as it inevitably must, the end result won't look much different from the old internet: big influencers running their own site/blog, with loose connections to ideological allies and a bunch of commenters in orbit.
And that's a good thing. Individuals get to choose servers that align with their views on moderation and morality, server moderators only need to deal with occasional maliciousness rather than trying to walk a fine line of tolerance, and your social group isn't at risk of being disrupted by a billionaire moving in and blowing it up.
It 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…
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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…
I will join you in your unpopular opinion. People have become so entitled that they can't appreciate the value they have in their hands today. Services like Twitter, Insta, FB, the like are in many ways incredible. We've forgotten all about that, but let's explore... They're pretty much always available. They scale endlessly without you noticing. They are fast. They have apps on every touch point. They preserve your…
I don’t understand why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn’t matter to basically all of the population. Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
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Or pay a hosting company to run one for you. At least you get to control your own community and moderation. Even if you are still subject to the whims of your hosting company, you still retain a fair amount of autonomy unless you are running a community like Kiwifarms (in which case I find it hard to be sympathetic anyway), or your hosting company happens to be located in a jurisdiction with enforced censorship laws.
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.
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> exposing the greatest human rights violation in American history through the Twitter Files scandal I don't usually reply in these Twitter threads, but cmon... surely you can see what a ridiculous hyperbole this is? American history includes: > Mass enslavement > Incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII > Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in war > Torture programs > Blacklisting of (ostensible) commun…
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You are aware that an entire generation of Internet forums operated (and still operate) this way, right? Big forums had big hosting costs and required donations from members, had issues with spam, had to source volunteer moderators from the community, etc., just like big Mastodon instances today. Small forums had few of those issues because the scale was smaller. The problem was not that nobody wanted to run a small…
> You are aware that an entire generation of Internet forums operated (and still operate) this way, right? And yet many of them died or, better put, most of the new forums were never born nowadays because communities moved to centralized, managed solutions (Facebook, Telegram, Discord, Slack etc)