> Much less risk to be de-platformed from your favorite walled-garden for obscure reasons.
Federation does absolutely nothing for this. The risk is probably even higher given how small most of these instances are. Much more likely to run into an admin/moderator.
I run a small instance and I don't think this applies. New signups are closed on my instance, and the only way to get on is for you to ask me for an invitation, or for a friend of yours who's on the instance to ask for you.
If you look like someone who I'd be likely to kick off my instance, I won't let you on in the first place. It's a private garden that I let my friends hang out in, not a public park where I have to let some asshole who thinks me and my friends should all be dead come in and rant and rave all they like.
"Oh I am totally being de-platformed! Free Speech! Filter Bubble!", you cry.
And then you discover that the Fediverse is split into multiple parts, and that there are instances that are delighted to let you say anything and everything you want as long as it is not explicitly illegal. You can even run one yourself if you have a bit of spare change! You can say anything you like on your own instance, you can follow anyone your heart desires. And anyone on another instance can follow you if they like. But no other instance is obligated to listen to you.
In the fediverse, you're more likely be able to say "Hey Lisa, why did you ban me?" than you can get into contact with the Youtube/Facebook/etc forces that be.
That may or may not be better because your admin may respond "Well because I think you're a jerk and disagree with your political views" but at least you can migrate to a new instance still instead of just being banned for all eternity.
If you want to keep your followers you'd need to migrate before they ban you.
But yes, I guess you can start over somewhere else while on big ones you're out forever. So in that sense I guess it is a tiny improvement. But if most of your followers were concentrated on server[s] that don't like you, you may not be able to reach them anymore.
> if most of your followers were concentrated on server[s] that don't like you, you may not be able to reach them anymore
This seems extremely unlikely. If the server admin doesn't like you enough to ban you, I strongly doubt you're going to have many followers there.
In any case, however likely or unlikely it is in practice, the incentives here seem exactly right to me. If you want the benefits of being part of a community, you have to respect its norms in your interactions with others in the community. The possibility of losing connections with people in that community if you are forced to leave it is part of the deal.
If your followers are "real" followers, and if you are important to them, they'll get in touch outside the fed and will know where to find you. Maybe that's what we should strive for. I have 200+ followers on Twitter, but if you ask me, I can only name 15 with real, social interaction.
If that's how you define "real" followers then you might as well use an IM application instead. IMO the whole point of (Twitter style) social media is having effortless reach and interactions without explicitly sending stuff to anybody.
I had over 10 thousand and had many interactions with people but wouldn't feel like bothering them on other platforms (unless it was of the same nature).
And the few people who bothered to contact me personally felt a little awkward too. I don't necessarily want to be talking to these people directly.
The magic is you just publish whatever you want and people can look at it. They can comment but there's no obligation to respond. Having actual conversations with that many people would be a huge chore. The whole thing isn't about having relationships with people at all but about spreading information. It could be about yourself in which case there would be some implicit one way relationship but that's just one use case.
Maybe that's why people are feeling lonely. They think their voice should reach thousands of people while they simply don't care about those thousands. How can I expect someone to care about me when I don't care about them beyond a useless number or marketing campaign?
People are thinking of others as consumers while expecting to be treated as a friend?
I second this. While I foolishly didn't export the list of people I was following when I've decided to shut down my own instance and just use an already established one, I've seen other people switching between instances without really losing much in terms of interactions.
I guess the questions this raises next for me are:
Would this scale if a given instance somehow gained the level of adoption people seem to value in a Twitter or a Facebook? It seems to me that the major draw and reason people stay on those services is the fact that they can communicate with essentially everyone in one place.
Also, to follow the first question, given that a major (if not the only) draw for most users is the ability to communicate with everyone, wouldn't that result in relatively few (or one) instance gaining dominance over time? You want to be connected to all of your friends and family, of course. But then all of them also want to be able to read what Beyonce or Trump or Biden or Bill Gates is saying. Their barbers and bartenders want to post the latest specials to all of their current and potential clients. If you all have to agree on an instance/sub-network/server/etc to use, why would people choose anything but the one everyone else is on?
I guess it might make it easier to migrate to a better-run or better-supported instance and add a bit of healthy competition to keep things in line, but from what I've seen of Facebook and Twitter, the near impossibility of getting people to switch to another competing service en masse always overpowers any individual's complaints about the current state of affairs. Facebook sucks? Well, why not swap over to that new ServiceX? Well...sure it's nicer but nobody is on it!
I agree. The issue with social media isn't the tech, its the people and its power structures forming over social networks.
This whole thing, social media, derives from 2 types of issues: Errors/Flaws in natural thinking, and malignant hacking of brains.
The second will always arise when you have more than 100 people in a group, and said group has some non trivial impact on voting patterns.
At that point, this group is like a unprotected bank account - which will be hacked.
The normal response is to protect this account and to target hackers - but current social thought (excluding China) has huge issues when it comes to censoring speech - and especially political speech.
Add to it layers of additional complexity, (political parties can abuse the laws and say they are being unfairly censored), and the distance between this solution and the underlying human problems seems equidistant as that of current Social media and the same problems.
Good points. First of all, it doesn't matter which instance you're on. You can still follow your friends, influencers, etc. on other instances.. unless your instance has the other instance in its blocklist (e.g. if it doesn't adhere to moderation rules that apply on your instance).
Natural re-centralization is an issue, with mastodon.technology and mastodon.social being by far the largest instances. This could devolve to a situation like you have with email / Gmail.
Another challenge is that Mastodon as early adopter of ActivityPub has made a number of required implementation choices to fill in the blanks of the spec. They support a bunch of custom properties in the message format, plus they use the Mastodon client API instead of ActivityPub client-to-server. Their dominance wrt running Mastodon instances means they have a big say in how Fediverse evolves.
Luckily the project team is open-minded, and mostly on the same page to others wrt fediverse innovation.
Thanks for the clarification. I'm not terribly educated on the state of Mastodon/similar federated social media.
Also interesting that you brought up Gmail/email. I've thought for a while (admittedly as someone far more on the "user" side than the "developer" one) about how email is an example of how things might work better. For as much as Gmail and a few others have captured the vast majority of the average userbase for personal email, it's still reasonably easy to choose a different provider (and can even roll your own if you really thought it worthwhile).
Switching email providers doesn't stop me from emailing people who use Hotmail or Gmail (ignoring for a minute any issues of overzealous filtering of uncommon mail servers). The individual services can implement their various extra features like spam blocking, auto sorting, etc. but for the most part, the common protocol means that an email from me@me.server can still be sent to a list of addresses at gmail.com, aol.com, hotmail.com, etc. If I want to send a message to people on Facebook, I need an active "valid" Facebook account that can be tied to their social graph.
The draw of the fediverse is that you can follow cross-instance.
I can be in my local community instance and follow people on say a major software instance and also an art oriented instance. It doesn't really matter who is on what instance. Connecting instances up is trivial - you join into the feeds generally.
Your instance more dictates your general discovery patterns and local moderation. In picking a local instance, I'm going to generally see discovery material related to my local area. If I joined an art instance, it would be art material, etc.
Generally well behaved instances (ie not spammy) shouldn't have an issue with getting federated, even if they're relatively small.
Federation does absolutely nothing for this. The risk is probably even higher given how small most of these instances are. Much more likely to run into an admin/moderator.