There’s such a thing as growth by subtraction.

What I mean by this is that if you want Mastodon to grow, you must be cognizant that Mastodon can’t be all things to all people.

To me, the promise of Mastodon is decentralization. Therefore Mastodon shouldn’t be the service for centralists.

That is, people who are looking for an exact replica of Twitter—corporate structure and all—should probably not use Mastodon.

@jnbrgr Because this isn't about "open source" -- it's about decentralization.

Usability is fine when it serves the objective of decentralization.

@Chris Trottier It isn't about decentralization per se. It's about a very limited understanding of decentralization which actually boils down to a late-1990s approach of "decentralization just by having smaller centralized systems connected to each other" - as in individual servers having accounts on it, accounts that are heavily tied to these servers and pretty hard to move elsewhere. We see these problems if we look at, in example, how incredibly complex it would be to support migrating posts from one Mastodon account to another. Personally, I am sure decentralization and usability aren't per se mutually exclusive. But the _current_ approach of decentralization and usability are (_because_ of that strong ties betweeen account and instance, and because of the importance choosing an instance has in this process), and if we want decentralization to succeed, we'd better strive for solutions that have sane decentralization irrevocably while _still_ being usable even to the most non-tech user you could possibly imagine. Right now we're doing pretty much the opposite.

@jan :mastodon:

@z428 @jnbrgr Yes, it is. It's entirely about decentralization.

Usability is fine so long as it creates the conditions for decentralization.

If it doesn't serve the purposes of decentralization, "usability" doesn't matter. In fact, such "usability" efforts are unusable.

@Chris Trottier Couldn't disagree more. At the very end, social networks are tools that should serve some sort of purpose, and they should first and foremost focus on meeting the functional requirements of this purpose. No one would use a system just because it's "decentralized" even while it doesn't get the job done, and actually we have a lengthy track record of centralized platforms outpacing decentralized ones simply because they worked for people (Slack vs IRC, WhatsApp vs XMPP, ...).

Decentralization, privacy, usability, ... are "just" nonfunctional requirements. They're all important, most likely they're equally important, but first and foremost it should be a system that works for users, otherwise it won't be used by a reasonable amount of people. Maybe decentralization is just poorly designed if it breaks usability at the moment.

@jan :mastodon:

@z428 @jnbrgr

Functional requirement number one: Nobody owns my data but me, nobody can change the system from under me, nobody can put unblockable adverts into my feed, nobody at all owns the network.

There are other requirements after that, but that is the prime directive in this federation.

@Adam Dalliance Why, in this case, not simply use some computer with your data stored in a markdown file offline? If it's just about owning your data in a way so no one can interfere with them, and if this is the only requirement, then why bother putting them online at all? 😉 That's what I mean: Despite all these (totally relevant and undisputable) requirements, isn't it first and foremost about making data available, visible to, interactable with for others?

@Chris Trottier @jan :mastodon:

@z428 @jnbrgr

I didn't say it was the only requirement, in fact I explicitly said there are other requirements too.

Just that the ownership of my data and the non-ownership of the network are the prime ones.

I'll get a Bluesky account one day probably, but not until I can run my own server.

I think most of my friends who are leaving Big Social are indeed doing so by just keeping their diary offline instead. Most of them aren't moving elsewhere, they're just quitting.

Maybe a few private Whatsapp groups that I'm not invited to.

@jnbrgr @z428 @pre On the contrary, pushing growth for growth’s sake is the tail wagging the dog.

What does it matter if everyone uses Mastodon if Elon Musk, or someone like him, ends up owning it?

I’d rather use a social network that no one uses and owned by no one than a social network used by everyone and owned by one rich asshole.

In fact, that’s why I used Mastodon for many years!

@z428 @pre @jnbrgr Nonsense. They can move to email. They can pick up a phone. They can send a text message. They can decide to simply not help surveillance capitalism.

If they want social media that can’t be bought by Elon Musk, well, time to learn about the benefits of decentralization.

@Chris Trottier Then why discuss this at all? The decentralized Fediverse will remain just what it used to be before Musks Twitter. Maybe Musk at some point will buy a bigger instance which will render this _instance_ more "centralized" again. Why bother? It won't change anything for you and the way you want to use Mastodon, would it? You still can run your own instance, you can block the large ones, you can move your account elsewhere and take your contacts with you. Why not simply ignore it? Why argue against how other use this system, then...? (No offense intended - I really don't understand it at this point...)

@Adam Dalliance @jan :mastodon:

@jnbrgr Inevitably, I would love for everyone to run their own server, or use social media on a peer-to-peer basis.

To me, the Fediverse is a stop gap.

this is the thing, yes centralisation does make it easier for newcomers but it also fundamentally changes Mastodon that would be a departure from the original intention.
Centralisation in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad, but Mastodon is not meant to be a straight replacement for Twitter, instead it’s its’ own thing. The lack of centralisation may not suit everyone but that’s ok, there are other options out there.

I’m getting used to Mastodon now and finding it valuable to me

Yep, totally true. But I think the entire fediverse should have search. I cannot find my friends on Mastodon, except when they are on mastodon.social.

That's something that is truly lacking: discovery. People can opt-out if they don't want to be discovered.

Mastodon’s on-boarding should take these unique features into account. Because pushing everything into one server also seems to be making a problem of its own.

Instances are staffed and funded by individual and groups and that essence needs to be made apparent. Servers at capacity should be flagged or cataloged as such; maybe what is needed is a way to help people spawn new ones as a consequence (hint. hint.)

so a mechanism to draw people in an help generate mastosprogs..

@arinbasu1 @yawnbox @z428 @nhan It’s not that I don’t want people to join mastodon.social, it’s that I don’t want this to be the default server.

If people are choosing to come here after being shown numerous options, then good.

This is merely a thought “experiment”, how might it be if we had something like “calckey.social” back in this time last year, when many people were leaving twitter in search of better alternatives, and we had people coming over to Mastodon but then ended up either not using or leaving because some of them found Mastodon to be confusing to use, and anytime people brought up the issue of Fediverse, these users would say Fediverse is too confusing (conflating Fediverse with Mastodon).

In hindsight, seems to me that if they discovered the power of #Fediverse with something like calckey.social, they would have stayed on. Sadly, although there was pleroma/misskey/calckey/foundkey, none of these gained the kind of user base that’d have been helpful to “spread” the fediverse around, 🙂 Mastodon is great but there is definitely room for others.

good thing email always works %100 of the time and doesn’t suffer from spam filters. I never have to deal with tickets where a user claims he/she never got their confirmation email despite my server logs showing it delivered. Corporate run networks are entirely transparent about moderation and the appeals process is widely known to be robust and fair. /s

give me a break

@joel b I've been doing that stuff (handling corporate mail for a mid-sized organization) since the late 1990s and yes, there's a load of things that just could break here as well. That's why I didn't write "it works 100%" but rather "you can be reasonably sure it works" (and I _mean_ exactly that). 😉️ With e-mail I've seen interesting effects too, but all these years I rarely stumbled across situations where things got completely lost and no one had a clue where or how.

@Chris Trottier @christopher :verified_gay: @eshep @Arindam Basu @nhan

I wish I shared your experience. Where do you find these users who are not clueless?

I can say in my ~6 months of running my own pleroma instance as a hobby that I have not noticed any trouble in my message delivery.