- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@kbin.social
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@kbin.social
- technology@lemmy.ml
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Mastodon is boring. I left Twitter years ago, and don’t miss it. I joined Mastodon like 2 years ago, I like it, but still find it boring.
Money. With no ads no company has any interest in it. Companies could very well make their own instances and advertise there but no one would follow, unless the ads had any value e.g. a bit of comedy or feel goods. No company wants to put any money into old school advertising they’d rather just pay Google or Facebook to shotgun ads into people’s eyes.
I seen a talented analysts leveraging this knowledge and making decent advertising firms. But that’s just conjecture.
Eventually they will join, but will take a while…
I really hope not. I’d rather the business and influencer stuff stay on a platform that they can monetize and not be a force to enshittify the fediverse.
It’s federated, not decentralized. Which even Mastodon itself doesn’t seem to realize or care, since they falsely advertise themselves as decentralized.
Decentralized means there is no central authority.
Federation just means there are many centralized authorities, that might or might not communicate with each other.
I really don’t see what Mastodon is supposed to solve in the long run. The server has full control and can do whatever it wants. Just look at what happened Threads.net. Big company joins the Fediverse and instead of celebrating, everybody starts thinking about defederating them. This approach is doomed to fail if it ever gets popular.
Nostr looks like a much more promising approach, with proper cryptographic identities and signatures. Nobody owns you there. Servers are just dumb relays. If one steps out of line, you can just use another one.
They don’t falsely advertise themselves as decentralized. They are decentralized even if you’ve come up with your own definition where there can be multiple “centralized” entities in control of the system.
There is no central authority in mastodon. There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email (which is also decentralized).
Nostr is also decentralized but it’s decentralized by a relay (? – the name of this sort of thing isn’t super well established; they’ve never really caught on) system (which is a twist on peer-to-peer models that overcomes some of the issues with peer to peer tech) instead of using federation.
There is no central authority in mastodon.
There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don’t want to talk to anybody else.
If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can’t move to another server. You can’t communicate with other servers that got defederated. Exactly the same as Facebook and Twitter. It’s only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn’t, which already has happened numerous times in the past. The whole thing is basically just based around wishful thinking. If everybody would be niche to each other and servers would run forever, it would be totally fine, but that’s not how the world works.
There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email
Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes. The saving grace with email is that you don’t have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don’t like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.
There is no central authority in mastodon.
There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don’t want to talk to anybody else.
Those are completely different products, and you’re continuing to abuse established terminology via your personal definitions.
I’m sorry but you don’t know better than everybody else about what’s centralized and what isn’t.
If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can’t move to another server.
Wrong again.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/
And yes, that’s a solution with flaws (though, I think followers automatically migrate now too, note this is an old blog post) but that doesn’t mean these things can’t be fixed. Ultimately federation can facilitate a sort of “data transfer” to an entry new server, automatically, but it’s a lot of work that hasn’t been completely finished yet.
It’s only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn’t, which already has happened numerous times in the past.
If you don’t like any of the existing servers, start your own. There’s no difference from that and using relays other than a server holds your data rather than your client(s) – which is a big problem with peer-to-peer stuff.
Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes.
I’ve moved providers several times. Email has pros and cons.
One pro over what mastodon has done is that you can use your own domain but somebody else’s server, which allows you to reclaim account ownerships/redirect via (basically) changing some DNS entries (which works even if the server is offline/breaks the social contract and refuses access to account migration tools). That could be implemented in mastodon too, but then again few people want to do their own domain management.
People don’t choose other providers because Google does it for free and they’re a household name. There’s not much pressure to go use Proton’s more limited free plan or pay Proton or anyone like them.
The saving grace with email is that you don’t have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don’t like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.
🙄
But you can move to another server, you just can’t take old posts with you
You can always move to another server. That’s just the Web. As said, don’t like Twitter? Move to Facebook. You don’t need federation for that. Having to leave everything behind is the fundamental problem that federation fails to address.
All you’re arguing is that the web is decentralised, not that any given website within it is.
twitter is run by one company
How does a completely decentralized platform handle data that should be removed? If some asshole starts posting CP or other fucked up shit, what exactly happens? With mastodont the server admin has the control to remove whatever he or she wants. Not perfect, but you have plenty of servers to choose from (or you can start your own).
You want something like society, mostly free but still with some ground rules. If it’s completely free there is also lots of scams and shady stuff. In the long run I think a platform like that will be banned by governments.
what wrong with defederating meta
It completely puts the whole system in question. If federation is optional and defederation happens for ideological reasons, what’s even the point of it? It just means that communication can get disrupted at any point at the whim of any random server admin.
look at what happened Threads.net. Big company joins the Fediverse and instead of celebrating, everybody starts thinking about defederating them. This approach is doomed to fail if it ever gets popular.
Let’s not forget threads planned to monetize every interaction it was aware of, regardless of any direct interaction with Facebook/Meta. The public pushback probably went a long way towards setting a precedent against that sort of activity. We’re really breaking new ground here and have a chance to take back what is increasingly an essential function of society from folks who would rather fill every waking moment of your life with ads.
Let’s not forget threads planned to monetize every interaction it was aware of,
So does GMail. Making money running a bit of the network should not be a problem, quite the opposite, that just means the network won’t run out of money. This kind of arbitrary enforcing of political ideology should have no place this low in the network structure.
Let’s not forget we’re really breaking new ground here
We really aren’t. It’s just repeating what EMail and Usenet have done for 40 years.
what political ideology
Turns out if you get rid of ads and the algorithm, you end up back in the land of sanity.
Also obscurity, practically none of the content creators or companies I followed on Twitter have moved to Mastodon and getting news from them was the only purpose of that site in the first place (for me).
This is the biggest problem with new social sites, the main reason for having them is the people on them (or not on them).
Which is part of why we should want all the popular social sites to be federated, so that holding the userbase doesn’t create an insurmountable monopoly and you can easily move to a better alternative without leaving your friends and content behind
