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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@z428 the first thing that needs to be done is talk to NON-tech users.

We had this discussion a bit ago. I remember someone went into the whole detailed idea of how people choose an email server. It was a very techy answer. How non-tech people choose a server is "Hey my friend uses gmail, guess I will go with that." Same thing with the Fediverse. How do non-tech people really thing, not how tech people think non-tech should think.

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..

@z428 The goal is to build social media that cannot be bought or sold by one entity or person such as Elon Musk.

And how to achieve that? Through decentralization.

How do we not achieve that? By centralizing Mastodon onto one server so that it can be acquired by an Elon Musk.

Your push for centralization ignores the elephant in the room: what does it matter if everyone leaves Twitter when Elon Musk could theoretically buy mastodon.social and now own a significant part of the Fediverse?

Is “easy onboarding” worth that very real possibility?

@z428 because the protocol allows people to move to a new server.

you're saying all this pro federation subjective feelings stuff while using the largest server of them all.

@yawnbox @z428 Yes, I use mastodon.social. I also use peerverse.space, atomicpoet.org, and calckey.social.

I’m in multiple places being active. And when I’m on mastodon.social, my purpose is to talk about the importance of the Fediverse.

@yawnbox @z428 Why don't you leave mastodon.social? Have 1 post like this as an announcement, then move to a smaller server, redirect your followers there, and use that account to answer questions/replies of others. And just stop posting/commenting here.

You can make a new account in a new, very small server, and posting about the importance of the Fediverse. Aren't we proud that we can talk to anyone regardless of the servers? You can be a prime example yourself.

I have a purpose on being on mastodon.social, just like I have a purpose on being on calckey.social.

See, the great thing about the Fediverse is that I can be in many places at once.

@nhan @yawnbox @z428 Leaving on the Fediverse is not easy. In fact, for accounts that have my amount of followers, it’s expensive. There’s the further matter of mastodon.social being the most federated server on the Fediverse. And there’s also the matter of if I were to leave mastodon.social, it would be to relocate on my own server.

But I also prefer atomicpoet.org to have another purpose.

@nhan @yawnbox @z428 I also run calckey.social, calckey.art, peerverse.space, vancity.social, atomicpoet.org—and others.

I’m doing my part for decentralization.

@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

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.

@z428 @yawnbox @eshep @arinbasu1 @nhan @skotchygut I don’t know how anyone can agree with Dennis Schubert when Diaspora is effectively dead. Diaspora has had 13 years to validate their approach, and it clearly hasn’t worked.

If Diaspora integrated with ActivityPub, it would be alive and well instead of another project with wasted potential.

The approach your talking about has already been tried. That’s the approach Diaspora took. Diaspora failed.

And this is because the approach that you’re talking about doesn’t allow for new, novel, and innovative approaches to social media.

People don’t want mere clones. They want something fresh and new.

I started my FOSS adventures in 1997 as soon as I could get my own computer that wasn’t shared by the rest of the family. I also remember those heady days though I was still quite young.

To attempt to answer your question I think such a standard will, in time, emerge from what we build today. It’s very difficult to nail the right design tradeoffs that will work for everyone. Far more so when we don’t get the benefit of a benevolent dictator who can ram thru a solution, for better or for worse.

I am okay with this tortoise and hare race because I know the closed systems will always disappoint and collapse around the egos of those who attempt to dominate them. It takes a village to raise a protocol.

@z428 The Diaspora approach is wrong because, at the end of the day, they talk to no other social network except for Friendica—and even that was met with outright hostility by Diaspora developers. Mike Macgirvin, who began Friendica, can tell you all about the numerous conflicts with Diaspora regarding interoperability with a protocol they made.

But mostly, it’s wrong because Diaspora has painted themselves into a corner. The service is stuck in an old Facebook paradigm.

@z428 I don’t know where you’re hanging out, but I’m seeing lots of innovation on the Fediverse. Misskey has a radically different feature set from everything else. Bonfire is likewise excellent. As slow as Mastodon is in development sometimes, the fact I can edit my posts, then track those edits is fantastic.

None of this would be possible with Dennis Schubert’s approach to development.

Diaspora once had 650,000 accounts. Hardly any are active anymore. Why is that?

@z428 Of course things can be done better but have you ever heard the phrase “Perfect is the enemy of good?”

Well, that applies to decentralized social protocols too.

Diaspora is so focused on everything being “just so” that they won’t talk to anyone. And that’s a problem.

A protocol isn’t merely about defining what stuff does. More importantly, it’s a gentleman’s agreement that delivery systems will be on good behaviour when a message gets sent.

Not ideal, but good.

@z428 Friendica never had the install base that Diaspora had. It never had the funding either. Or even the press.

And yet, despite initially being made in 2010, Friendica has enthusiasm *right now* because they have a fundamentally different approach to protocols from Diaspora.

Friendica will talk to anyone. Friendica uses its own protocol, DRFN. But it also uses Diaspora and ActivityPub.

Friendica is happy to talk to everyone. Diaspora is not. That’s the difference.

@z428 You allude to the fact that developers aren’t excited about Diaspora anymore. And that’s because developers don’t want to work on something that insists on everything being “just so”.

Developers are excited about working on Friendica, though. You can use it with Fedilab. It just got added to @tootsdk.

Both Diaspora and Friendica are relative the same age. One of them follows your preferred approach, and the other doesn’t.