A photograph of a short-eared owl mid-flight was the last Instagram post biology professor Carl Bergstrom shared before announcing his departure from the platform Jan. 10.
This isn’t good, though. The whole point of the Fediverse is to be a decentralized network. If we push everyone to a single server, we’re centralizing the network!
This comes with added expenses for the maintainers, for one, and increases privacy and data-protection concerns as well.
Also, Mastodon actually already funnels people towards .social, though they don’t push it too hard. Check out joinmastodon.org and see for yourself.
IMO, the solution needs to be something like a server auto-selector, where the location of the user is taken into account, weighted by the number of active users on the server, and using some sort of vetting system to try to avoid sending people to unmaintained servers (like only selecting servers with a certain degree of uptime and uptime stability).
What happens when their server expenses aren’t covered, or bad people move in and every message has to be moderated, or the site moderators ban you?
And getting a whole community moved over… oof.
I moved a private mailing list to a WhatsApp group, then they changed their privacy policies. It took two years to convince people on to Signal, and 2/3 of the people didn’t make the jump. And this was with a small group of people who knew each other IRL. Imagi e doing that for tens or hundreds of thousands worldwide.
This is why people are hesitant to get off Meta/Twitter. They’re not going to do it again.
Just to be clear… I’m a massive Fediverse fan, and have concerns about BSKY’s governance. But many communities streaming off Twitter seem to be heading toward BSKY because it’s a shallower on-ramp.
Mastodon people recognize this and are working to smooth down the friction points.
just tell people to join mastodon.social. problem solved
This isn’t good, though. The whole point of the Fediverse is to be a decentralized network. If we push everyone to a single server, we’re centralizing the network!
This comes with added expenses for the maintainers, for one, and increases privacy and data-protection concerns as well.
Also, Mastodon actually already funnels people towards .social, though they don’t push it too hard. Check out joinmastodon.org and see for yourself.
IMO, the solution needs to be something like a server auto-selector, where the location of the user is taken into account, weighted by the number of active users on the server, and using some sort of vetting system to try to avoid sending people to unmaintained servers (like only selecting servers with a certain degree of uptime and uptime stability).
What happens when their server expenses aren’t covered, or bad people move in and every message has to be moderated, or the site moderators ban you?
And getting a whole community moved over… oof.
I moved a private mailing list to a WhatsApp group, then they changed their privacy policies. It took two years to convince people on to Signal, and 2/3 of the people didn’t make the jump. And this was with a small group of people who knew each other IRL. Imagi e doing that for tens or hundreds of thousands worldwide.
This is why people are hesitant to get off Meta/Twitter. They’re not going to do it again.
What happens when BlueSky does this?
Answering your own question there.
Just to be clear… I’m a massive Fediverse fan, and have concerns about BSKY’s governance. But many communities streaming off Twitter seem to be heading toward BSKY because it’s a shallower on-ramp.
Mastodon people recognize this and are working to smooth down the friction points.