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Andrew (bookseller era)

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time.

This is bigger than some technical standard.

This is cultural, political, and economic.

We represent an existential threat to the business model of some of the most wealthy corporations on the planet, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone take that away from us without fighting against it with everything I have.

We are standing on the precipice of a transformative shift in the way we, as a society, relate to one another through the internet.

We are moving away from a Broadcast and Toward a conversation.

18 Nov 2022 at 15:40 | Open on retro.social
31 comments
Andrew (bookseller era)

This is mutual aid, this is anticapitalism, this is collaborative ideation.

We are living revolutionary values, right here, right now, on a silly little social media network.

And I will fight to my last breathe any God Damn corporation that tries to Monetize that.

This is the future, and you're a part of it now. Be a good steward of the future.

18 Nov 2022 at 15:41 | Open on retro.social
Aral Balkan

@ajroach42 Which is why we also have to be vigilant about corporations capturing the narrative via corporate proxies like the W3C (who are already publicly patting themselves on the back for having gifted us the fediverse).

18 Nov 2022 at 19:27 | Open on mastodon.ar.al
Mike 🍁:verified:

@aral @ajroach42 I had to lookup W3C first. But they are doing this??

19 Nov 2022 at 0:15 | Open on mastodon.coffee
Aral Balkan

@ravensview @ajroach42 Look at their membership and the business models of their members. How many of them are surveillance capitalists? (I’ll start the list: Google, Meta, Adobe…)

To see what I mean about surveillance capitalists, see which of those companies are also on better.fyi/trackers and also see m.youtube.com/watch?v=4oOCLIrB

19 Nov 2022 at 8:43 | Open on mastodon.ar.al
Whiskers Kenbrook

@aral @ravensview @ajroach42 Surveillance Capitalists...that is much more accurate than "targeted ad spend"

19 Nov 2022 at 17:03 | Open on freeradical.zone
Lisa

@ajroach42 Thanks so much for enabling this! 👏🏽

18 Nov 2022 at 20:21 | Open on mastodon.social
Mike 🍁:verified:

@ajroach42 Well, Trump already did by stealing the S/W for his Truth Social.

19 Nov 2022 at 0:16 | Open on mastodon.coffee
Andrew (bookseller era)

@ravensview And the folks running it are losing money hand over fist and have been blocked from the majority of the network.

19 Nov 2022 at 0:17 | Open on retro.social
sj_zero
I don't know that being against billionaires and corporations is
necessarily anticapitalism (private control of capital is what gives us the freedom to create our own websites), but besides that point I agree with everything you've written.

These megacorps have gotten too big for their britches, and they've forgotten we don't actually need them.
19 Nov 2022 at 2:03 | Open on social.fbxl.net
Torgny Bjers

@ajroach42 The main caveats I see are ISPs trying to throttle things if you self-host, as well as people just paying even more money to Amazon, DO, and others.

19 Nov 2022 at 2:56 | Open on grim.run
Andrew (bookseller era)

@torgny ... Lots of folks self host on raspberry pis and similar on home connections without giving any money to DO.

Amazon is far from the only cloud provider.

Are you sincerely worried, or are you concern trolling because we don't all run co-los? (I'm working on it, but physical infra takes time.)

19 Nov 2022 at 3:05 | Open on retro.social
Torgny Bjers

@ajroach42 No, not trolling... I am sincerely worried for the people that are self-hosting.

The problem as I see it is mainly with the stack Mastodon runs on.

Node + Rails + Postgres + Redis is a pretty high-level hydra when it comes to fighting the battle of scaling.

Which is obviously why a lot of Mastodon servers are facing issues right now and why there's so much talk about how "slow" Mastodon is.

As if Mastodon is a single entity.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:20 | Open on grim.run
Andrew (bookseller era)

@torgny Instances are too big. Mastodon isn't the only fediverse software. Scaling this stuff isn't actually that difficult, but it can be expensive if done poorly.

Is there a sustainable business model? That would require there to be a business. I stated pretty clearly that we're mostly a bunch of hobbiests.

as for the scaling problems, DAUs essentially increased 3 - 5x across the whole network, and 10x on many instances. Show me any company that can absorb that much traffic without a hiccup. None of the places I've ever worked could do it.

@torgny Instances are too big. Mastodon isn't the only fediverse software. Scaling this stuff isn't actually that difficult, but it can be expensive if done poorly.

Is there a sustainable business model? That would require there to be a business. I stated pretty clearly that we're mostly a bunch of hobbiests.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:25 | Open on retro.social
Andrew (bookseller era)

@torgny In all seriousness, I'm actively exploring what the expenses would look like for a 10 - 50k user instance, and what the moderation and technical support needs would be.

If we can figure out a way to make it sustainable, we'll do it.

In the meantime, there's no "business model" just people doing a thing because they believe in it.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:27 | Open on retro.social
Torgny Bjers

@ajroach42 I definitely am on the believer side!

I fired this same server up in 2016, ran it for a while and then lost interest because most people were still on Twitter.

Now I'm back, probably for the long haul. And it looks like a bunch of people have made the switch, which is very exciting.

I chose to use DO for this because I am not entirely comfortable hosting a public instance on my home network where I also work.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:40 | Open on grim.run
Andrew (bookseller era)

@torgny We're on DO at the moment, too, but that's transitional until we end up in the co-lo we're spinning up across town.

I've self hosted from a pi in a closet, I've run containers in the cloud, I've run bare metal in bulgaria. It all just keeps chugging along.

The software, for all my complaints, is pretty good. Throw brutaldon.online in to the mix, and it's downright pleasant.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:44 | Open on retro.social
Torgny Bjers

@ajroach42 That sounds awesome! I definitely host things on a variety of different hardware as well.

I finally got my fourth Pi 4 so I can spin up my home k3s cluster that I put in a cute little 1U rack thingie.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:50 | Open on grim.run
Adversarial Geography

@ajroach42

As a new user, I couldn't be happier to have found this place. The core philosophy and intended user experience of this platform feels like a very positive evolution of the technology that connects us.

Learning how to participate and contribute, however, has been a bit of an uphill battle. I wish that there were more resources for onboarding new users.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:08 | Open on mastodon.social
Andrew (bookseller era)

@Adversarial_Geography It helps on the smaller instances, you normally get a little more handholding.

What help do you need?

19 Nov 2022 at 3:11 | Open on retro.social
Q.

@ajroach42 @Adversarial_Geography Butting in to say I have an intentionally small, nurturing instance and you’re welcome to join if it sounds like a place you can thrive.

Andrew, do you think huge 50k sized instances are desirable? It’s hard to build authentic community (imo) with that many people.

19 Nov 2022 at 14:13 | Open on realsocial.life
Andrew (bookseller era)

@imtheq @Adversarial_Geography I don't, no. I'd rather 1,000 10 person instances than 1 10,000 person instance.

But federation is confusing for some folks, so we'll have to find a middle ground somewhere.

19 Nov 2022 at 14:54 | Open on retro.social
Syrus
Gwyndolyn Bane

@ajroach42 While it's defiantly an adjustment, I'm hoping this will be a good fit for a weirdo like myself- trans, queer, neurodivergent and NSFW are not really accepted in the greater world, even when you make sure to follow guidelines.

19 Nov 2022 at 4:13 | Open on socel.net
Zenobia Żaczek

@ajroach42 it would be easy for corporations to embrace and extend fediverse and re-create their own centralized version of it, wouldn't it? It's bound to happen in a couple of years, so let's enjoy what we have right now.

19 Nov 2022 at 14:41 | Open on mas.to
Andrew (bookseller era)

@zenia Would it?

We don't have the same problems XMPP had, and we have better tools for isolating corporate centralization.

What would EEE look like here?

19 Nov 2022 at 15:05 | Open on retro.social
Zenobia Żaczek

@ajroach42 I'm not gonna pretend I know the protocol, but is there some reason why a company with lots of servers could not offer quick user onboarding and additional services and do so progressively so that it didn't get blocked until it's too late?

19 Nov 2022 at 17:21 | Open on mas.to
Andrew (bookseller era)

@zenia a technical reason? Probably not. Plenty of social ones though.

19 Nov 2022 at 17:52 | Open on retro.social
Randy Resnick

@ajroach42 From my experience of being on the web since its existence, the majority of people do not have either the curiosity or the energy to try new things. When otherwise intelligent people complain (nicely) that Mastodon is hard to understand, I wonder about how we measure intelligence. Some folks will never try a "new" thing until the one they're used to is gone.

19 Nov 2022 at 16:43 | Open on fosstodon.org
lesighlepurr
Will Easton

In order to be the viable alternative to the bird site, we'll have to support some big growth over the next few months, and that will take some $.

Who's working on sustainable ways to fund Mastodon, globally and locally? What will create a community spirit of donating to support both local instances AND the movement as a whole? As the movement that takes down Twitter ... what's our equivalent of Bernie Sanders' "$27 bucks"?

(Former Mozilla Foundation grassroots fundraising lead here :-) )

20 Nov 2022 at 1:02 | Open on mstdn.social
Sailor Dad 🪷

@Willeaston there’s a ton of ways to support this free open source decentralized project. Most links can be found on GitHub. Such as github.com/metabolist/metatext and github.com/mastodon . I think the real challenge is going to have sufficient growth of independent servers to scale up the network as the user base grows. docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run

20 Nov 2022 at 4:40 | Open on mstdn.ca
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