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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

#201

Post by noirbot »

ncallaway wrote: post #71
endtime wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Twitter so maybe this is just wrong, but isn't part of the appeal of Twitter that regular users can interact with celebrities?

I think it depends on what you mean by _celebrities_. For me, the appeal of Twitter is being able to interact with various communities (such as the legal twitter community). There are people who are fairly popular in that sphere, that I really like being able to see their thoughts on various issues and even ask the occasional question (Popehat, Akiva Cohen, Mike Dunford, Greg Doucette), etc. Are these people celebrit…

Yea, I think this is the biggest thing. Most "real" celebrities can still post on Twitter or whatever. If Elon Musk or Lebron James or Barack Obama posts something important, I'll probably see it wherever they decide to post it. They could just yell random things at passersby on the street and I'd probably find out about it if it was interesting enough.

The value of Twitter a lot of the time is less the big name Blue Checks, but the long tail of niche blue checks. I bet a massive amount of people on Twitter have no idea who Paul Graham is, or Popehat, or Marco Arment, or even dril, but they all have some number of people who were mostly on Twitter because of them primarily, so if they and their friends all move to something else, their fans will follow.

In some ways, it's not too different from TV hosts or journalists of note. People will watch John Oliver on whatever TV network he's on. For certain niches, no one cares where they write/speak as long as it's not so insanely paywalled or otherwise cumbersome that it's a problem to follow them to it.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#202

Post by noirbot »

zerocrates wrote: post #143
maxsilver wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is not a thing people regularly did? Old-school blue checks were never a status symbol, just a way Twitter used to denote "real" (meaning from-the-author-stated) and "fake" (real-humans-parodying-someone-else) accounts. The idea that they denoted status was a criticism…

Despite it not being their stated purpose, they absolutely were a bit of a status symbol, though one that waned as more of them were given out of course. People routinely complained (both jokingly and seriously) about not being verified. It's not that rich and famous people needed the tiny bit of bonus (though some of them probably did), but that it was a marker of notability for less famous people. It's kind of like…

Yea, for the folks I know who got blue checks in the sort of post "because you know someone at Twitter" zone, the whole exercise was more people joking or complaining about how random the whole thing was. I remember one time where half of the hosts of a show I follow got verified, but not the others, which was insane since the only possible verification that would be relevant would be that they were, in fact, the hosts of that show.

They're a status symbol, but I don't think almost anyone really cared about outside it of people who didn't have them and felt like they should. I'm not sure I ever saw a sort of "why would I trust you if you don't have a blue check" sentiment.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#203

Post by crazygringo »

pwinnski wrote: post #185
crazygringo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding 1), I'm sorry but that makes no sense. Barack Obama has more than 100 million followers on Twitter. So no, a hard limit of 10 million users makes no sense for any messaging service that intends to connect people across the world. That would be a showstopper if there ever were one. Would you say the same thing about e-mail, that it "would still be fine" if it only ever scaled to 10 million people?

The world, it turns out, contains more than just hammers. The fediverse, it turns out, isn't primarily a messaging service. So yes, if you define X as "a messaging service that intends to connect people across the world," then X must support as many people as possible. But if you don't define X that way, then not supporting 100 million people isn't such a big deal. Millions of people are already happily on fediverse…

I'm sorry, but just a million times no.

If Mastodon isn't "a messaging service that intends to connect people across the world", then I can't even imagine what it's supposed to be. Because that is exactly what it is.

And if it somehow hit a limit at 10 million total users, then it would be a complete failure. And to say that "it wouldn't really detract from the Fediverse" if you couldn't follow popular people because some limit were hit, you couldn't be more wrong. It would detract from it entirely and totally. It would defeat the entire purpose. And just because you don't want to follow popular people doesn't mean other people don't.

Precisely because the entire point of federation is that you're not stuck with separate forums, each on their own server, that don't talk to each other. The entire point is that they communicate in order to connect as many people across the world as users desire.

Again, how is this any different from if e-mail were capped at 10 million users total? Since you didn't answer the question.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#204

Post by OctopusLupid »

fleddr wrote: post #148
vorpalhex wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a feature, not a bug. Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small. Consider running your own for your friends.

Serious question: if a community is so small as to be just your friends, why not start a Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord group? Free, fully managed, content preserved, well established.

Don't forget Matrix.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#205

Post by Zak »

pwinnski wrote: post #150
Zak wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being based around a protocol rather than a single piece of software, it will likely end up that servers intended to grow large will run different software than servers intended to stay small.

I suspect that key to the future of the fediverse is likely to be a more efficient piece of software than mastodon.

I expect very large servers will be commercially operated and running bespoke software. When Tumblr adds ActivityPub support, it will be the largest Fediverse instance by far.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#206

Post by georgyo »

rcarr wrote: post #84
enumjorge wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a famous enough person hosting their own instance So if the likes Obama or Stephen King want to move over to Mastodon their barrier of entry would be to complete this laundry list [1] or find a service that does this for them? Given that they own the instance, they would also need to provide moderation for it. I don't disagree that there are solutions to the scale problem. What I have trouble seeing are solutions t…

I do wonder if the next phase of social media is to encourage people to use a single user instance similar to mastodon.host. It would probably have to offer more than just twitter though e.g peertube, pixelfed etc. Start with a free tier, have it all running on auto scale and then notify people when they start getting popular that they need to scale up and start paying for their instance if they want to grow their au…

Most likely not, mostly due to lack of discovery.

When you start off an an empty instance, the only thing you see is yourself. There are no trends, there are no posts, and everywhere you click is just you.

You have to start following people for it start populating, but that requires knowing strings to follow. And then you can you see is stuff in your bubble (maybe a feature?).

But it really missing the dopamine response, as after you read the stuff people you follow posted or boosted; there is nothing.

A dedicated person can push through this initial period. But for mass appeal, people will quickly bounce if they feel like no one else is there.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#207

Post by vohzd »

EarlKing wrote: post #12
323 wrote: post #5

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…

When we talk about scale, are we really talking about bottlenecks?

What fascinates me, is that LetsEncrypt has 2 beefy servers and that's it.

Surely, a few million packets of highly compressible text over the pipe isn't that much of an issue? Is it? I've never done it so interested in hearing thoughts.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#208

Post by postalrat »

numpad0 wrote: post #178
mempko wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is scalable. Why doesn't anyone remember how shitty Twitter was when it was growing. Slow and constantly breaking. Mastodon is working fine even after millions moved to it. Yes, Admins had to scale up, but they did it. I like that I pay my admin. No ads. No bullshit.

My primary email addresses are @gmail.com.

Thats your mistake. You can use gmail with your own domain.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#209

Post by nerdponx »

darkwater wrote: post #163
nerdponx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I mostly attributed this at the time to UI/UX improvement in the centralized platforms, and not needing so many different logins for different communities.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#210

Post by sangnoir »

323 wrote: post #5

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?

> What if 100 mil users want to move?

Tumblr will be happy to host them! Matt[1] from Automattic has stated that Tumblr will be joining the Fediverse soon.

1. https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1594577983028740096

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