New from me: what makes social networks resilient?
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr160-everyone-wants-servers-and-nobody-wants-servers/
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I think a large thing that is not talked about for fediverse servers is total cost of ownership, from your wallet and your time.
I ran one of the larger servers for over 10 years and the $99 a month in cost to the server host was the smallest of my overall costs. Once you add in legal fees for lawyers when some random user decides to upload a photo of a minor or someone reports your server as a spammer because they forgot they signed up for your service and you end up with IP or domain name bans things add up money wise and stress wise pretty quick. On top of that when you allow others you also become tech support for anyone who does not get it or can not login etc.
I think until grandma can host her own instance in 1 click, like signing up for a gmail account then we will continue to see the churn of new servers by the hour, and dead servers by the hour.
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Fediverse is resilient because everyone can afford to run a family server.
What about a different path where no new big servers are needed because each user is on its own server ?
Software like #holossocial can solve the need of technical skills
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@observer That's good thinking - thanks for sharing this and explaining TCO so clearly. We certainly have ideas on how to reduce the technical, moderation, and legal cost. FASPs are probably part of this. Our future Belgian foundation could help on legal and compliance topics.
I believe the grandma-one-click-Gmail analogy is not perfect, though, because the exemplary grandma doesn't start their own email server on Gmail.
Oh that would be great, with hundreds soon to be thousands of softwares with 50,000 servers needing legal help that would be great! I have noticed that people do not understand the complexities of hosting servers in other places and need that legal help also, I live in the US but host in Germany, so my local, federal laws apply to me, as does the laws of Germany, the EU, and GDPR for example, that’s a lot of laws and guidelines to follow!
Yes my example was as easy as that process not it being the actual process.