Let’s share our thoughts and paths for the good of the #openweb
What’s do you think/feel about this fundamental change in the #fedivers
What might be really good is if instances implemented one of those learning bots that came with good advice while one starts using mastodon. “Welcome, read more here about Mastodon & the fediverse” “Start by making your first post. Often people introduce themselves. Use the tag #introduction so people can find you” “Search for something that interests you. When you find a post you think others should read, boost it. To let the author know you like their post give it a star”
etc, you get the idea. Then some comments about how the community works. If there is concern that such intrusions rely on tracking they could also just be staggered with one per login & a question “keep showing these hints?”
There’s really nothing we can do to change the culture of new users except keep being wary about what we boost, and being polite and constructive with tips and critique.
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This is a good event for Fedi. But something is bothering me about Mastodon. There are a lot of new people, and much of them don’t understand the value of decentralization. These people register mostly on mastodon.social, and it’s not the best way. It’s looks like we have one main and a lot of small instances.
Maybe it’s will be better to add some message before register like “Hey, there are great amount of different instances!”, just to place people evenly
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This is pretty natural. People are going to join a big instance to start, spend some time and learn more abou t how this all works. Then they may move to one or more smaller instances, some may even start up their own. There have certainly been efforts to help people move down this rabbit hole but I see it as a fairly natural progression that doesn’t really require some big concerted effort.
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We need to think about how this is funded and how work is done, a call-out from #OMN project covering the cost of running #openweb servers with growing user base.
The cost of community-driven federation - Open Collective
#openweb #4opens
After #mastodon #twittermigration, the next #fediverse app that is ripe for #mainstreaming is #peertube what do people think?
This is going to be more difficult as the #4opens culture is MUCH less strong with this project and the hard Right already have a wide footprint.
We maybe need to start digging some trenches as this battle will be harder.
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The dev process is #4opens but socially dysfunctional, the project is good, useable and seems to scale. We have been running an instance for years and keeps getting better http://visionon.tv
The mod tools are weared but you can make them work if you go with the flow.
It’s ready for #mainstreaming, but it’s also dangurus as it has no “politics” or “culture” to protect it like mastodon has.
This is a major weakness that the #geekproblem finds hard to see.
One thing I have learned
“The horizontal “governances” is missing from all the codebase. It’s feudalism in code. Forcing us to be princes and kings at every crisis… we need our own code #OGB”
This is urgent.
Intriguing, I came here to post a suggestion very much like this. Here’s the way I imagined it working, from a post I made in the 'verse a couple of days ago: Strypey: "#fediverse software feature idea" - Mastodon - NZOSS
Imagine each instance has a built-in Welcome Bot that is automatically followed by any new account on that instance. It posts tips that help people new to the 'verse to learn the basic concepts and features. Particularly the concept of following across instances and how to use the moderation tools. It can be unfollowed in the usual way, so a veteran who has migrated from another instance, or is setting up an alt, can easily shut it up.
The advantage of using a bot is the same bot could, in theory, be used in instances of any fediverse software, spreading the cost of developing it. Each project would just need to modify the text of its posts to fit the UI of their software.
If a few people think this idea has legs and are willing to help with a prototype we can spin this discussion off into its own thread.
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I’m guessing some of you have already come across Fedified? This probably also needs its own thread, but I’m thinking it would be good to have a consensus statement on this, that a broad range of fedi software devs and instance admins support.
Some questions it needs to address;
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Who verifies the verifiers? How do we know the people running Fedified are who they say they are?
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Why is a list on a dodgy-looking external site more reliable verification than verified links in the account profile?
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How will this scale when the 'verse gets as big a Titter, or as big as FB?
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What protects Fedified from being acquired by someone like Melon Usk as a way of centralizing and monetizing the 'verse?
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I read about this point in a paper which can be found here: https://emilianodc.com/PAPERS/mastodonIMC19.pdf
At the time:
- Amazon is used by only 6% of instances but hosts 30% of users. Cloudflare hosts 31.7% of toots across 5.4% of instances.
- Due to differing popularities of toots, we find that global outages in just 10 instances could remove 62.69% of global toots
- 93.66% of all federated subscription links are posited with the top 5 countries and 89.1% of all toots reside on instances in Japan, the US, and France
This I think shows a tendency to centralization on the popular platforms using the Fediverse, which could potentially be exploited by a large actor like Twitter to amass control of data. I’m not sure how this could be handled, and I guess it’s a new problem (?). Some mitigations could be to facilitate easy migration of a users’ data, and easier self-hosting
I’m reluctant to catostrophise about Twitter’s potential for “embrace, extend, extinguish” because following other points about culture, to be honest a small and decent community is often better than a global one which “doesn’t get it”
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The current influx has kicked off another round of debate about the ethics of archiving and studying public posts. It would be good to host a discussion on this and see if we can get some consensus about reasonable expectations of post privacy and control, and how to make sure UI guides people to post in ways that fulfil their expectations of the software and the network.
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A friend is looking to set up a new account, so today I went hackers.town and clicked on ‘Create Account’. It appears they have closed registrations for the time being. On mobile, clicking that link took me straight to the servers page on JoinMastodon.org. On my laptop, clicking it popped up a modal that I’ve seen before. It explains that you can follow accounts on this instance from others, and offers a choice of either creating an account on that server, or finding another (in this case, the option to create a local account is disabled).
This seems like a really good UX, that helps solves two problems; people thinking they need an account on every instance where people they want to interact with are found, and people clustering on a handful of mega-instances.
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On the overall topic, the fediverse has absorbed previous smaller influxes before so I disagree that it’s a fundamental change, however I understand that a difference in magnitude can lead to new phenomena. Overall what I’ve seen are scaling problems which are being solved in that beautiful decentralized way that may percolate back to inform default configurations. I’ve been impressed that uses with 10k+ followers are starting to appear and not totally break everything.
I’m actually a little concerned about tribalism and hope that all people have a fair chance to join and share their experiences without being dismissed because of what caused them to join.
The fediverse though we use this word it isn’t just one thing, it’s more like a community of communities and I expect it’s only going to grow in scale and diversity of all kinds.
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True, it would be good that the initial influx ends up disseminating people from larger instances to smaller ones, possibly new ones as well.
I concur. But most people coming here do not get this point, and will use whatever they’ve been pointed to. One way to avoid winner-takes-all network preferential attachment situation would be to clearly document and communicate about choosing an instance and migrating accounts. Maybe larger instances should actively participate in a degrowth campaign to balance users across more instances.
A couple years ago, Matrix.org went down, which precipitated an exodus of Matrix.org users to the next bigger instance of the network. It happened to be weho.st, which was and remains a small non-profit service provider. Their costs of operation suddenly boomed. This is probably something most instance admins on the Fediverse want to avoid.
Yet, there is not a single space where such discussion can happen in a way that enables many #mastoadmins to figure a common sense policy to absorb new users without growing beyond their capacity, or making the Fediverse brittle with too much concentration. This type of conversation requires a stable URL, which is why we have this forum. But we are far from reaching out to all the right people in order to achieve this kind of cooperation. Maybe it’s impossible to achieve, I don’ t know, but losing words to instantaneity won’t help either.
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We are trying to do this here Activism it’s much harder than it should be.
Ideas to make this possible at all:
- mod tools to just do this for people (even make this part way is a good step)
- mass email of users, as the current tools have no reach.
- new users shouting into the void is total fail and normal behaver for people?
- joinmastodion is looking like a centralization fail to us, we can’t update the wrong text description on our instance listed, and we can’t get our other instance listed. The site is a #dotcons blank for info with no relevant help files I can find. This has completely blocked our ten-year-old #openweb project for the last few weeks, crap and more mess.
- people are pushing all the funding at the “famues” people, this is part of the damage feedback of centralization.
OK enough for now.