I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media.

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media

…

Federation does not work I’m not saying federation “won’t” work or “can’t” work. Merely that in 2025, nine years after deployment, federation does not work for the Mastodon use case.

I could opine at length about possible federated architectures and what I think the ActivityPub people clearly got wrong in hindsight.1 But the proof is in the pudding: Mastodon simply doesn’t show users the posts they ask to see, as I quickly

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    To quote from one of your links:

    Funding is like oxygen. Organisms that do not have circulatory systems can only grow to the size of insects.

    Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.

    If the idea that drives the Fediverse wants to succeed we need to build 60.000 volunteer run Pixelfed etc. instances, and that is not an unrealistic number at all, but it takes time.

    You can’t shortcut this process with more funding and commercial companies, because if you try, you end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      31·
      7 days ago

      You’re arguing with a right-libertarian, FYI. This should explain some of their positions and arguments better.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        a right-libertarian

        You have no idea how wrong you are, but if this is what you need to believe to sleep at night, I won’t be able or interested in changing your mind.

    • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.

      I once had this conversation with some other “indie entrepreneur” who was arguing something along the lines of “I don’t care about VC funding because my competitors all come and go, and my business still endures.” When I asked “Does this mean that you can make out a living out of your business?” and his response was “no, but I have a full time job, so my business is default alive”

      He wasn’t too happy when I pointed out (a) he had a hobby, not a business and (b) cockroaches are also optimized for survival, but outlasting your competitors mean jack shit if they are playing a different ball game. He spent all this time pretending to have a business while his competition was actually out there fighting for customers.

      All of this to say: there is no consolation in being “right” in my death bed. I am not interested in something that “takes time” if in the mean time my kids are growing up in a world dominated by Big Tech. Anyone who understands how bad Big Tech is bad for society should be rushing and actively accelerating to build an alternative.

      commercial companies (…) end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.

      It’s is basically impossible to create a monopoly around FOSS services. It’s a commodity with high R&D costs but zero cost to distribute and replicate. You can only jack up the prices of commodities if you collude with your competitors or create a cartel.

      The main thing holding back the development of a healthy cottage industry of hosting providers, consulting services, app customization, etc is not the Big Tech players, but precisely this “culture” of people expecting services for free.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        There are plenty of examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology. Especially in social media it is more about network effects and having enough funds to buy up any potential competitors. Facebook could be FOSS and it would not change anything.

        The culture to expect this for “free” is not exclusive to the fediverse, and while it has been exploited by adtech companies to build large surveillance advertisement monopolies, it is by itself not wrong for people to expect that basic services are not held behind a paywall. It just needs another organisational model to function, and comercialisation is not going to work.

        And besides those general considerations, your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream. Digital services have a fundamentally different economic basis that leads to huge efficiency gains at scale. If you do not actively work against that, any cottage industry will quickly consolidate around a few big players and you will basically have replicated the current system.

        • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
          1·
          6 days ago

          examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology.

          Citation needed?

          I have no doubt that you point out some markets and see a large corporation dominating it. But a de facto monopoly? Not so much.

          your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream.

          I’m sure you know that there are plenty of small businesses making a living out of email hosting, even if Google and MS account for 80% of the market.

          In pretty much the same way that lots of local business just ditched their own web pages to go to Facebook, but this didn’t kill all the other website builders companies out there.

          • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
            1·
            6 days ago

            Now you are contradicting yourself. Sure, there are survival niches for small cockroach companies in the shawdow of the large FOSS based oligopolies, but that is the status quo and no improvement at all.

            • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              1·
              6 days ago

              A “cockroach business” is something that has no significant revenue but at the same time takes up so little resources that can be operated forever. This is completely different from, e.g, small email hosting providers like Migadu or some agency that gets real customers to make wordpress customizations.

              • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
                1·
                6 days ago

                You can argue all you want about definitions, but that doesn’t change the fact that these companies are at the wim of the large oligopolies and pose absolutly no threat to them, nor do they even want to because their business indirectly depends on these oligopoles existing.

                • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
                  1·
                  6 days ago

                  these companies are at the whim of the large oligopolies

                  Why? We are talking about FOSS and services based on FOSS, here. Do you think that Google would be able to successfully shut down small email providers without repercussions?

                  pose absolutely no threat to them

                  Why is that relevant? I do not particularly care about eliminating the large corporations, at least not from the start. I’d be more than happy if we could grow this ecosystem here to become a sizable share of the overall market.

                  I’d rather work towards a world where Facebook has “only” 70% of the market to themselves and the rest of us foment a healthy economy sustaining the other 30%, than to keep this delusional idea that a scrappy bunch of nerds are going to be able to take Lemmy/Mastodon/PixelFed/Matrix/XMPP to the mainstream by wishful thinking and “community” alone.

                  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
                    1·
                    6 days ago

                    Many of these email providers only exist as a less bad alternative but compatible with Gmail etc. And the oligopol could shut them down any time as their primary service is sending emails to the oligopol.

                    What you are proposing is basically to make the Fediverse a small managed opposition to Meta’s Threads, which I am sure Zuckerberg would love.

                    But that is not what the Fediverse tries to be and neither does it aim to become mainstream. We are doing prefigurative infrastructure building here. If people want to join, great. If not, also no problem. But if society decides to finally get rid of this capitalist hellscape, then the Fediverse will be there and ready to use.