Fediverse Report
@mekkaokereke @Homebrewandhacking The gap is closing indeed when it comes to the technical side. Even better, a gap is growing in governance structures between fediverse servers and Discord/reddit/whatever platforms. What you're doing with Hachyderm/Nivenly is a great example, but others (such as Evan Promodou) are also working on coop structures to run a server.
There will be growing pains for sure with so much extra onboarding, but the potential is also so much bigger
mekka okereke :verified:
@Homebrewandhacking There are ~6.7 million active Discord servers. There are ~2.8 million subreddits. So even 100K Mastodon community servers doesn't seem that high.
The big difference is that today, it's much easier to set up a Discord server or a subreddit than a Mastodon community server, but that gap is closing.
PJ Coffey
I do like the idea and want to help people move.
But it seems like 100,000,000 is a lot of people. That's ~10% of the 1,300,000,000 Twitter accounts.
Good moderation is supposed to be impossible over 1000 people, I read.
So we'd need about 10,000 new servers. Or 1,000 ~10k people servers. A thousand mastodon social servers. A lot of moderation and new moderators.
It would change the feel of the place for sure and timescale feels important too.
mekka okereke :verified:
If Twitter is sinking like the Titanic, then Mastodon community servers are the lifeboats. And there are not enough lifeboats. ??♂️
Don't just call people still on the Titanic foolish as you row away. Make more lifeboats, and make them easier to climb into! ??
mekka okereke :verified:
If a person says they want to see Mastodon scale to support 100 million users, a lot of Mastodon users will jump on that person's neck. ??♂️ They'll be accused of having "VC brain", or being obsessed with hyper growth.
It's not about hyper growth for growth's sake. If you truly believe that Twitter is bad(tm) and Mastodon is good(tm), and that people should leave Twitter, then where exactly do you think those people should go? There's hundreds of millions of them.
mekka okereke :verified:
Telling people to leave Twitter is silly anyway. The math ain't mathing for Elon. He may be losing hundreds of millions a month. Advertisers ain't coming back. The Eng and policy teams are at unsustainably low levels. This doesn't end well.
But I'll repeat what I said in my 1st few months on Mastodon: if you want communities to move over to Mastodon, make Mastodon better for those communities. Don't just yell "Elon is bad!" Many of the people you're telling, knew he was bad way before you did.
mekka okereke :verified:
When Elon was losing class action lawsuits for his blatant, egregious, and widespread racism against Black people, and Black folk were decrying his Alt-right antics and the harm that they cause, everyone was fine. Tesla drivers weren't all the devil. People still cheered SpaceX launches.
Now Elon's Alt-Right antics have come for a much wider circle. Now everyone that stays on Twitter is the devil, and an irredeemably bad person? ??
This one-way solidarity ain't it.
mekka okereke :verified:
@Paxxi @timbray Yeah, but I've become radicalized with the idea that good moderation of smaller communities is *relatively* easy, and of larger communities approaches impossible. As in, moderating for 10 friends is relatively easy, 100 is hard, 1000 is about the limit of an untrained pro, 10K requires a group of trained pros, and I don't know (m)any well moderated 100K+ communities.
Not sure if this is more because it forces a high mod:user ratio, or because mods can understand context easier.
Pär Björklund
@timbray @mekkaokereke the tech and hosting parts will likely be solved, there are already some managed offerings.
The hard part about running an instance is moderation and I don't see that changing
Tim Bray
@mekkaokereke Can't disagree with any of that. I have this optimistic vision of a future where the Fediverse is a large collection of small lifestyle businesses and member-owned co-operatives.
I think I'm less worried about tech & scaling than you are. There'll be painful spots but there are enough people around with the development and ops mojo to get us through.
I expect GCP & AWS to offer instance-as-a-service and there's nothing wrong with that.
mekka okereke :verified:
@timbray Same!
But the National Science Foundation is a kind of VC firm LP'd and GP'd by science loving US government employees. ??♂️
And a crypto DAO is a kind of co-op run by crypto bros. ?
A lot of VC assets are controlled by alt-right adjacent dudes. If 95% of all co-ops were DAOs, I think many folk would similarly assume that most co-ops don't do any good in the world, are usually harmful, and are often run by sociopathic alt-right degenerates, intent on destroying the world for profit.
Tim Bray
@mekkaokereke How about “I believe that modern VC-driven business models are irredeemably flawed, to the extent that that lifeboat comes with an unpluggable leak”.
Personally working on trying to prove that an instance based on co-op principles can be sustainable.
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