 Whoa — #Mastodon passed 10 million users yesterday. According to @mastodonusercount, the number of hours people spend on here is increasing too. That's incredible. It's a moment to celebrate and to get excited about the work we still have ahead scaling and securing the #fediverse. I'm starting work on a blog about what it will take to get us to the next 10 million, and I'm curious about what my friends on here think about it. What do we need, in terms of tech or otherwise, to keep growing? 14 comments
@danilo Yes! And a way to keep those experts and their efforts from fracturing too much, I think... It's a feature of broader open-source communities too. Decentralization creates a wonderful bazaar of different ideas & approaches to the same problem, and that's a Good Thing, but it can also lead to inefficient allocation or use of resources, or great ideas getting lost in the noise. If we want to go far we need to go together. How do we get them to come?  @haubles organize in cohorts, recruiting groups in related work Science communicators, or infrastructure engineers, or abortion rights activists A cohort model gives people community and discussion on day one. That’s what got me to stick on Twitter, once upon a time. I’d had the account for over a year but when I added my name to a spreadsheet of iPhone devs, I suddenly had a community overnight! @danilo Oh, interesting... my initial thought is, isn't that built-in by way of your home instance -> local timeline? But then again, I set up shop and migrated off a few instances before I settled here on #Fosstodon. Perhaps it's that discoverability needs to be improved then. @haubles maybe but I think I see this as an organizing problem more than a product or automation problem if you want specialized groups to stick it helps to give them a shared onboarding experience, I think. Then they know they’re in it with other people, they can compare notes, etc what I’m describing is definitely in the vein of the “do things that don’t scale” advice for early startups @haubles normalize organizations, governments, cities and more to run their own servers — just like running your own website. Tooling and systems from managed hosting and more to support many more long tail organizations to do this safely and securely. @bmann yes! @mozilla and @medium have instances, who else? governments and cities... somehow, I feel like they'll be the last to the party. Have you seen any examples of such? the only location-based instances I've encountered so far are grassroots efforts from locals. and completely agree on the tooling and systems... it will be interesting to see what springs up for the non-technical aspects of adminning an instance, like policy drafting, community management, etc. @haubles I don’t mean tech orgs running things that integrate into their existing product users. I mean a long tail of smaller companies running instances. You “trust” a domain name, so if mayor@your town has an account it’s verified. And this will require education on many fronts. And potentially tooling for cross posting, like Buffer, because orgs won’t drop existing channels. @haubles @bmann @mozilla @medium The German federal government has had its own Mastodon server for about a year now. Many of their institutions have an account at: https://social.bund.de/about The European Union has had its own server for about six months now. Also with many institutions and key people with their own account: https://social.network.europa.eu/about @lennardvanotterloo @bmann @mozilla @medium Amazing!! Thank you for sharing, Lennard. Perhaps I should have said, "US gov't will be the last to the party..." We're usually a bit behind y'all, aren't we? xD @haubles @mastodonusercount welcome to visit Chinanews.social, we are building a community caring about what's going on in China😊 @haubles @mastodonusercount counterpoint: why do you assume growth is good and desirable in itself? @tinlids @mastodonusercount Hm - I don't think growth for growth's sake is good or desirable, but I am excited by the idea of more people finding the community and kindness that I've found here too. And I think those qualities can be maintained, even at a greater scale, if growth occurs thoughtfully and intentionally. |
Gregory's Server
@haubles We need more experts and activists to join and maintain a baseline for what is real and important, building a backbone for meaningful pursuit of consensus. This was part of what gave twitter power, and made it such a productive commons for discussion and community. If only for a moment.