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   Josh Braun (josh@sciences.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 06:05:54 JST Josh Braun

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   Richard John <https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674088139> highlights how the growth costs of networks have often led to great incumbency advantages. With the telegraph system, for example, lots of startups died after creating small regional networks because they didn't understand the unique economies of scale going in. That enabled the giant monopoly of the day, Western Union, to grow even more mammoth in size by buying out these smaller networks and incorporating them into its huge one. 12/

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     Josh Braun (josh@sciences.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 06:05:55 JST Josh Braun

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     The largest servers may take on the clout of city councils if smaller ones want access to their users, giving them the power to set the terms for rights of way. That said, the opposite dynamic seems also to be true on some sites, with admins automatically refusing to federate with instances over a certain size on account of the attendant moderation difficulties. 11/

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     Josh Braun (josh@sciences.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 06:05:56 JST Josh Braun

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     There's no government to negotiate with in the Mastodon network, of course. Servers connect with one another more or less by default to deliver messages. But it's also quite simple for one server to silence or defederate with another over offenses, heinous behavior, or even simple policy differences. That means some level of negotiation is often happening between admins to get servers un-suspended. 10/

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     Josh Braun (josh@sciences.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 06:05:57 JST Josh Braun

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     Another issue has to do with rights of way. In the physical world, the government is the one with the power to allow you to trench up streets for your cabling or use a particular radio frequency, so they have lots of leverage over you. You can't move your Chicago telephone exchange to Philly, either, so historically governments driven hard bargains (not these days for reasons I'll touch on). Unsurprisingly, then, graft and logrolling have long been rampant in the telecom business. 9/

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     Josh Braun (josh@sciences.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 06:05:58 JST Josh Braun

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     You see this every time a novice admin posts with exclamation points about how quickly their new instance's hard drive is filling. And they're providing the service for free, so they're not recouping *any* costs apart from possible crowdfunding donations. 8/

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     Josh Braun (josh@sciences.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 06:05:59 JST Josh Braun

     The Mastodon network doesn't rely on laying cable (that's someone else's scaling-infrastructure problem), but all the point-to-point connections between users in the network do create analogous scaling issues in terms of data storage, which piles up as those links are established—each connection a conduit for a bunch of new posts that have to be stored somewhere. 7/