> Imagine you're a rather small server and suddenly Eli Lilly and Company joins your instance.
The point of mastodon is not that big companies will join small volunteer-run instances. They can run their own mastodon servers, just like they run their own mail servers and chat servers (or, more accurately, they outsource running their own mail and chat servers to Google and slack).
The right place for ActivityPub to land is that businesses and institutions will host their own (or pay a SaaS offering to do it for them, like they do with email and their CMS today), individuals will sign up to shared services (like you sign up with gmail for email, or blogger.com to blog).
The problem is going to be holding the barbarians at bay. All the same stuff we have to do for email will need to be deployed: Community blocklists for misbehaving servers, IP reputation, ML spam detection…
And funding it will require cash which the adtech industry will spiral in and offer to provide. ‘Federate with our servers and we’ll pay you 1c for every message you allow us to post to your users…’ Server admins will resist for a while but eventually, the walls will crack.
Enjoy it while it lasts, this burst of old school volunteer-run internet. It won’t survive this eternal September. It never does. As the architect of the Matrix said: Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it
There’s also an open and active GitHub issue on mastodon discussing how to separate server hosting from domain name so you can point DNS at an existing instance and use it from that domain:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
Actually there are several and some are listed on the Mastodon website[1]. Look in the "So you want to run your own Mastodon server" section.
I have only heard the best about masto.host but they have closed subscriptions for now (which only speaks for them IMHO). I have personal experience with Ossrox and Weingärtner IT, they are both excellent and I can recommend them without hesitation. I have no affiliation with any of those companies except being a customer of the later two.
EDIT: The price of a small instance is less than a Twitter subscription. So, if you want your own instance - which as pros and cons - nothing is holding you back.
Fully centralised, but the best counter example I have in my mind is Reddit; here you have largely community moderated content under a general umbrella of quite loose policies. Reddit is I think pretty successful in that even though some subreddits are totally overrun with moronic content, the ones I care about are high quality. So even though it's centralised I don't think any of the fundamentals that make it work can't be decentralised. If Mastodon can follow these rough guides for how to make community moderation work, I think there's a chance it can be successful without falling into the cavern that email did.
Twitter could have done what Reddit did. Dorsey just didn't get it and Musk gets it even less. Reddit has been growing slowly, making some very public mistakes along the way but never getting ahead of their skis. I think it's definitely true that Twitter was bloated, but firing half the company on a lark was a pretty stupid plan. They need to cull features, pay down technical debt and reduce costs. They also need to strongly affirm that their moderation policy is to create a platform that is free of abuse and amenable to the most people possible. Not "free speech".
The two smartest people in this business are Yishan Wong and Ellen Pao.
> Community blocklists for misbehaving servers, IP reputation, ML spam detection…
Not really. Email and ActivityPub are radically different in one way that makes all the difference: AP is whitelist-based (follows).
> Federate with our servers and we’ll pay you 1c for every message you allow us to post to your users...
And this is a fine model - much better than all the power concentrated in one stagnant entity that forbids everyone else from participating, extending or improving.
I don't see how follow-driven whitelisting eliminates issues with misbehaving peers. ActivityPub servers can receive 'Follow' requests to any of their inboxes, from any server. Seems like a peer that just pops up on a random address, spams out a bunch of follow requests referencing actor profiles containing crypto pump-and-dump scams, then vanishes would be just as much of a nuisance to Mastodon as an equivalent SMTP-based spammer.
> Enjoy it while it lasts, this burst of old school volunteer-run internet. It won’t survive this eternal September. It never does. As the architect of the Matrix said: Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it
This is perhaps my biggest regret. I've ignored Mastodon because it seem too much like a PITA to deal with. Now I've been looking at it more seriously, but so has everybody else who's on Twitter, so by the time I get there it's going to be... Twitter pre Musk. This isn't really that appealing. Coulda woulda shoulda, etc., but I just wasn't paying enough attention at the right time. Rather like Bitcoin. Don't get me started.
Meh... It was a pain years ago and Mastodon is still a pain today.
It's not like torrents and likes of PirateBay that make downloading movies easy. It's very complex to get into the network. It's like Mastodon is trying to not let you in.
As a side note, imho, there's little incentive for (large) businesses to associate with any particular instance because of the evident risk that users would target and harm their brands.
"Eli Lilly" did effectively join Mastodon, in 2018, except that it was Wil Wheaton, and ... things went poorly.
Wil joined what was at the time my own home instance, following something of a flameout on Twitter, itself caused by 1) people harassing him there, 2) Wil employing a shared, user-generated blocklist which 3) by both its own size and celeb-driven adoption rendered many other Twitter accounts effectively blocked --- not by Twitter, but as a result of individual adoptions of that blocklist. How legitimate inclusions were, and/or how feasible it was to get off the blocklist, I really can't say. That said, Wil arrived on Mastodon with both a large fan and foe base.
The admin/moderator was ... less than transparent or capable, and responded to a case of "this profile is causing me problems" by banning that profile rather than seeking out the root cause of the griefers who'd in fact triggered the problem.
Mastodon's evolved its own tools and practices (both technically and as a community, including a community of admins), and should perform better in future, though much engineering progress emerges through pain, suffering, or worse.
Wil is, in the world of celebrity, fairly modest stakes. I've heard tales of Twitter that there was a point where it could only handle a tweet from one major celeb (e.g., Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, or one of the 'dashians) at a time, and effectively had servers dedicated to sufficiently large accounts. Celebrities proved an interesting stress-testing mechanism.
Mastodon ... has not yet experienced this, and I've my concerns with how well it might handle such scaling, or what specific elements of scaling (users, instances, posts, interactions, ...) will prove most problematic. I've certainly seen and heard of numerous cases of growing pains over the past few weeks, though nothing insurmountable.
But:
1. Celebs and brands are profile types that should be considered.
2. Mastodon's had some experience and performed poorly, both technically and culturally.
3. Adding very-high-profile profiles to the network needs some consideration. It's quite likely that there will be poorly-thought-through adoptions in future, however.
Right, the issue here is like if Wil Wheaton starts hanging out at a café, and it's just a small café, and the owner at first thinks it's pretty cool that a celeb is hanging out there, and some trekkies start coming by, which increases the vibe of the place...
... but then a bunch of guys in stormtrooper outfits start showing up every day and the trekkies start fighting with them and the cops are getting called out and pretty much eventually the owner is going to ask Mr. Wheaton to stop coming by.
And because it's just someone else's café, he pretty much has to do that.
The good news is, going to that café is not the only way for him to participate in the fediverse. He is the proud owner and operator of wilwheaton.net, and he can point that at his own activitypub server, that nobody can kick him off. He can bulk block all stormtroopers, interact with the trekkies in the café, and handle his own bandwidth and compute bills for delivering his content to all his fans.
Bonus: the fact he's posting from @wil@wilwheaton.net acts as a pretty solid cast iron guarantee of authenticity, that you are dealing with the one and only actual Wil Wheaton.
Meanwhile, Stephen King is sat at the café down the road trying to figure out why the new owner there wants him to pay him $8 a month to have the owner keep telling people who walk in 'yep, that's the real Stephen King over there'.
Celebs likely need to pay instances directly for their traffic they generate and the admin overhead of any Reports they get. They likely need to pay for personal instances that someone entirely controls for them. It may take a while for this knowledge to disseminate, and it is unfortunate Wil Wheaton was the early adopter that ran ahead of such knowledge.
To my understanding, there were further complicating factors involved beyond just "scaling":
- At the time I heard that the mastodon.cloud instance admins and moderators spoke English as a second language (it was started to primarily focus on Japanese Mastodon, to my understanding), which added an accidental language barrier to the challenge of moderating that many reports (and being able to seek out a "root cause of the griefers")
- I still don't know how to make sense of the whole counter.social thing and Wil's supposed involvement there (which happened before the mastodon.cloud incident). I think it was partly a scam that accidentally honey trapped Wil with very bad timing, but he doesn't refer to it directly in his own account, only obliquely, so I don't think we know an answer for sure. (Only what I observed in federated Meta drama from a tiny instance at the time.) But to my understanding it still relates to some of the root causes of some of the grievances. (counter.social is a now entirely defederated instance with alt-Right associations and markets itself as "safe" and "secure" and "celebrity friendly" and "InfoSec focused" and is run by an admin referred to most commonly as "The Jester", seemingly somewhat in homage to/love for Batman's nemesis The Joker.) I can't imagine knowing the full facts ahead of time that Wil would have ever chosen to associate with that sort of instance on purpose, but I can understand (some) of why once accidentally associated with that sort of instance it caused some lasting grievances.
> The point of mastodon is not that big companies will join small volunteer-run instances.
But does this really address that issue? I see this as an attack vector really. Let's say Elon isn't happy with the competition. He can join a small server and force them to either increase hosting fees or to shut down. That's really the point of the author's comment and the relationship to scaling.
I don't know the underlying architecture of mastodon, so forgive my naive question, but why wouldn't rate-oiniting be a solution in this instance? Or if one believes they're under attack by a large group of people by aimpling registering and posting 1 post, then rate limiting won't be affecting, so they could realistically pause registration, right?
> Federate with our servers and we’ll pay you 1c for every message you allow us to post to your users…
What's the problem there, if you know all your users have corporate-mandated spam-blockers installed that will drop the spam they're paying you to forward?
> My Claim: Decentralization is a Questionable Goal
Hard disagree with this. Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. You can use any email provider and interact with any other email provider effortlessly. This is undeniably an improvement over internal direct messages within a centralized service (i.e. Facebook or Twitter DMs). If you leave facebook, you leave your contact list and message history. On email, if using a custom domain, you can switch email providers or even host your own server without anybody on your contact list even having to know this occurred.
Lots of people have been banned from platforms, rightly or wrongly. You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do.
> On the topic of moderation the very same issue is even more absurd. Some instances want uncontrolled free speech where some instances effectively are pure shit-posting instances which are completely de-federated from the most of the fediverse as a result. Other instances really like to control their content, where some popular ones such as fosstodon ban all languages than English as a result to allow moderation.
These are talked about as problems, rather than being the primary selling point.
The problem starts here. Not many people who are not tech savvy even know what a custom domain is. Let alone having an email with a custom domain.
> You can't get banned from email
Ask people who get locked out of their gmail account.
What we techies miss is that there are more people who don't understand technology and are not willing to spend time learning about it as they have other more important things to do. Tech is just one of the tools they are using to get their tasks done. We cannot expect people to spend time understanding everything about tech. It is not surprising that it took a commercial company with aggressive behaviour when it comes to controlling users data to put BSD on regular non-tech consumer desktops. And why Microsoft Windows succeeded in being on regular consumers desktop OS whereas commercial Linux-based OS struggled; and the company that successful put Linux on mobile devices also has quite a record when it comes to users data.
We techies can talk a lot about decentralisation and owning data. But the regular non-tech users really don't care. They just want simple things done quickly using tech and get on with their lives.
Recently I saw videos from multiple news channels on how to use Mastodon. They were at pains to explain to users how there are multiple servers and one has to choose a server, which is run by individuals or organisations. And if the server goes down then the user has to move to another server. Regular non-tech users really don't want to get into this complexity. Has anyone ever seen TV channels explain with great effort how to use Twitter?
> Ask people who get locked out of their gmail account.
And, from the other end, ask people who actually self-host e-mail - not just own the domain, but also run their own mail server. The anti-spam measures of major e-mail providers are, in practice, banning insufficiently determined self-hosters from e-mail.
I'm a techie and I know how to setup my own email and custom domain, and even then I can't be bothered.
I also know how to bake my own bread, but I'd rather get it from the store.
Completely self-run email is a bad user experience, just like making my own bread. Most people here forget that people want convenience over anything else.
> What we techies miss is that there are more people who don't understand technology and are not willing to spend time learning about it as they have other more important things to do.
I'll go stronger than that: if your theory is that people should want to be their own sysadmin, and people who don't want to be a sysadmin don't deserve [a thing] then your theory is bad and you should feel bad.
Getting locked out of Gmail is not the same as getting banned. One is losing access to a specific account. If you get banned from Twitter or Reddit you are ostensibly not allowed to just create a new screen name.
> They were at pains to explain to users how there are multiple servers and one has to choose a server, which is run by individuals or organisations. And if the server goes down then the user has to move to another server. Regular non-tech users really don't want to get into this complexity. Has anyone ever seen TV channels explain with great effort how to use Twitter?
I would point out that the concept is really no different from how ISPs work, and yet the public seems to have wrangled with that one.
> Email is the example I give people of how federation could work... You can't get banned from email.
Except e-mail has been a total failure when it comes to spam/abuse, and in practice it isn't this federated, decentralized paradise at all -- virtually everyone I know uses Gmail for their personal account. And if you want to run your own server, good luck getting Gmail to accept your e-mails at all.
And if you can't get Gmail to trust your server, that's pretty much a ban for all practical purposes.
Plenty of organizations and individuals run their own servers and have no problem exchanging email with Google, Microsoft, and other large providers.
The point is that they can and do because the system is not, in fact, centralized.
Also, judged only on the volume of spam and abuse, many systems besides email -- decentralized and centralized alike -- could be called a "total failure." And yet somehow these systems remain stable and functional and useful.
No one called it a paradise. That's a strawman argument.
I've been using my own domain for my email for over two decades. In that time it's been self-hosted, hosted with Google, and hosted with Fastmail. I control it, so I can take it wherever I want. I've been able to take my full message history with me too.
It has not been a "total failure" with spam/abuse either, though I'm glad to have Fastmail handle that for me these days.
In any case, I'll take the tradeoffs over a centralized system.
> virtually everyone I know uses Gmail for their personal account.
Which, ironically enough, is the answer to everyone’s problems with mastodon.
Does everyone you know use gmail for their business accounts?
Does absolutely, 100% of the people you know use gmail for personal accounts?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say no to both the above.
There’s no reason mastodon has to be everyone runs their own server just like everyone doesn’t have to run their email server today. People use the company server for work stuff and fluffycat233575@yahoo.com for personal stuff.
I don’t know if it’s just the HN bubble but all people post is why it can’t (or shouldn’t, because, get off my lawn) work. It’s like people have a vested interest in making sure non-adtech doesn’t succeed, almost like their very livelihoods depended on it.
—edit—
And, back in the day, spam filtering was something you had to do on your own or just dealt with all the spam. The big email providers became big in part because they solved that problem for most everyone. In ‘97 nobody (OK, nobody but the US postal service) was saying there needed to be this gigantic corporation monitoring everyone’s emails for wrongthink or only a central entity could solve the spam problem. People just bucked down and solved the problem enough to get a sizable portion of the population using email…I’m genuinely curious if there’s ever been a technology with higher uptake than email now.
And when I wanted to rid myself of all things Google, nobody needed to know, I didn't need to rebuild my contacts -- I moved my custom domain to a different provider, done and done.
Beyond that, Twitter is rife with spam, scams, and tons of other abuse. So is Facebook. So is reddit. The fact that email doesn't work that way doesn't matter.
FWIW, I have been using ProtonMail for about four years for my personal email, and I haven't had any issues with communicating with folks from Gmail or Outlook.
Regardless, I don't think it's contradictory that people flock towards a somewhat-centralized system like Gmail; the point is that it still supports an open protocol. The fact that Protonmail "just works" when emailing Gmail is a testament to the fact that federation can work in practice, even if it does start becoming more centralized.
My email addresses do get more spam than, say my Twitter DMs. But my email provider (not Gmail) is good at identifying most and my own Mail client can pick up the rest.
So the net number of spam emails in my email inbox is less than 1 per week. On Twitter, for me it's at least 1 per day and there's nothing I can do to tweak the filtering.
> And if you want to run your own server, good luck getting Gmail to accept your e-mails at all.
I still can, but only because I hate myself enough to run my own email for more than 20 years, so there must be some magic field of trust somewhere in the background. I wouldn't start from scratch though.
You live in a weird bubble if that's the case, or maybe in the USA. Or both.
Less flippant, very few companies except startups and one person shops use GMail in Germany. I'm no fan of Outlook and Exchange, but that doesn't mean I can just ignore it away.
Email is my go-to example of all the problems of federation. In theory any person can stand up their own server and interact with everyone else. In practice, there's been so much abuse over the decades that it takes a staggering investment in time/energy/money/expertise to do so. Enough that's it's completely beyond the reach of the vast majority of people.
This problem is so bad that's it's driven a quiet de facto re-centralization of email.
Usenet is another example of the problems with 0 moderation and federation. Sure, it distributed amazingly (many ISPs mirrored usenet data), but once spammers started spamming, it quickly died as a discourse medium.
Those with concerns over censorship need to face the fact that we've previously had 100% censorship free platforms and nobody uses them anymore. We dumped those platforms because of the lack of censoring, not in spite of it.
Heck, HN is moderated as well, I don't think most of us would be here if it was unmoderated.
Email is still vastly better than just about any other online communication platform we have devised since. Even with re-centralization, there's still plenty of small email providers - and the crucial part is that they all interoperate with GMail, Outlook.com, and other big brands. And for those who absolutely must run their own server, they can do that, even if it takes a lot of effort.
Is it bad that one email provider has lots of the market? It doesn't mean there's still not a long tail of alternatives for anyone to use if they feel like it. We haven't "standardized" on Gmail until no one else is using anything else, and we're a hell of a long way from that. Gmail has 30% of the market.
> These are talked about as problems, rather than being the primary selling point.
The Mastodon implementation of this is legitimately flawed.
The issue is you need users to be independent of servers.
That isn't hard to implement. Make the user ID in the protocol the user's public key and user@domain is just a human-friendly pointer. If you transition from user@a to user@b, your pointer changes -- or you can use both for an indeterminate amount of time -- but the public key stays the same and so everyone who followed you or signed up for your feed still sees it.
The current implementation is broken for multiple reasons.
First, it makes you have to care who is hosting you, because if they become adversarial or go out of business or you become large enough to want to self-host, you lose your account. That shouldn't happen.
Second, with users tied to hosts, it becomes "convenient" for hosts ban entire other hosts, which is poison because it's the dynamic that led to the bulk of email moving to GMail and Outlook. Once providers are big enough they can ban smaller ones ("for spam filtering") to exclude competitors. The protocol needs to prevent this by making the host fungible. Not doing so is a significant design flaw.
Well, it's too late now, so I guess we're stuck with it. Just look at email for example: its fundamental design is quite flawed as well, since it was conceived before anyone dreamed of spam, but now there's no way to fix it aside from hacked-on additions like spam filtering. The protocol, devised in the 1970s, can't be changed now, and we can't get everyone to upgrade to a new protocol.
Why didn't the architects of Mastodon think of this stuff before? It should have been pretty obvious that people might want to move their accounts between servers. But now, they'll *never* be able to. The only way it can happen is if someone creates an entirely different social network like Mastodon and somehow gets everyone to switch to that instead, but it's probably too late now.
Email is an example of how federation fails, not how it works. It is now centralized in the hands of a few providers with the power to blackhole independent actors.
That centralization mostly occurred due to the economics of below-cost pricing though. It's not necessarily due to federation itself failing as a mechanism for email.
In other words, Gmail is the most popular email provider because it's in Google's interest to have people be logged in all the time so they can personalize search results, so that incentivizes them to make a very good email system and then give it away for free. Giving something good away for free because you gain indirect benefits via some other business will rapidly centralize more or less anything, which is why there are at least theoretically rules against market dumping and tying (which aren't really enforced in the software world, but that's another matter).
We can imagine a parallel universe in which search is far more competitive, with lower margins, and thus Google couldn't financially justify subsidizing consumer Gmail for so many years. In such a world it's likely that there'd be more players, perhaps they wouldn't be as good but there'd likely be more of them, there'd probably be companies that specialized in selling spam filtering tech to them and it'd look more federated than what we have today.
Freedom doesn't mean the requirement to spend the community's resources propagating material that the community agrees is harmful or objectionable. That would be the opposite of freedom.
The ability to refuse actors that the community doesn't want to spend resources on is essential to freedom.
Every actor has the freedom to choose whether to conform to community norms, or to form their own communities with different norms.
I'm skeptical of everything, and have been a long-time skeptic of Mastodon in particular, but I'm less concerned about this particular argument.
* People don't need nu-Twitter to be perfectly reliable they way they do for mail
* For that matter, nu-Twitter doesn't really need to be a unified namespace; it can be less coherent even than email addressing and still add value, the way RSS feeds did.
* In the years before Google centralized all of email, it was pretty common for people to have multiple email identities on different services, which seems like the worst this is going to get.
I don't love the software, and the user experience definitely isn't ready for prime time yet, but the basic model seems workable?
It's still viable to use a minority email provider, even if that now has to be a medium-size ISP (at minimum) instead of your own server. There's still a difference between no choice and many choices.
Someone posted delta chat[0] on here a while back. Basically chat that is email. Or maybe email that is chat. It struck me as a clever idea at the time and got me thinking whether you could make a social network entirely out of email. Sounds bonkers and probably is but you know, gotta think, right?
> You can use any email provider and interact with any other email provider effortlessly. This is undeniably an improvement over internal direct messages within a centralized service
But the general public went for siloed systems instead.
So I’d say you or me want decentralization, but I don’t think that holds true in general.
True, but it's way easier to add centralization to a system that is decentralized by nature than it is to somehow decentralize something that is centralized by nature.
> But the general public went for siloed systems instead.
And yet some former Twitter users have identified why this is a problem, and are now moving back towards a decentralized platform. It's why scaling Mastadon is even a topic right now.
>Lots of people have been banned from platforms, rightly or wrongly. You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do.
If there's anything to be learned from the KiwiFarms saga, it's that these statements are no longer true.
On the topic of censorship / cancellation my limited experience so far has shown me that defederation happens and plenty of servers are entirely unreachable from the rest of the ecosystem. I’m not sure if this is an argument in favor or against anything, but at least it shows me that there are different standards and ideas at play and they really don’t fit well together into a coherent view of what Mastodon is. It really depends on “which mastodon”. poa.st and hachyderm.io are both Mastodon instances but they generally don’t cross as an example.
Kiwifarms is very much online at its original url... getting booted from cloudflare does not by any means mean you have been banned from having a personal website (even if your content is reprehensible).
"Email is the example I give people of how federation could work"
That presupposes that federation is actually a goal and not a means to an end. It's amazing how great developers are at not understanding what creates value. Twitter's value is _reach_. Get 400M users in one place, hook them with interesting content, server them ads, nudge them to sign up, track their engagement to make the platform sticky and attract more contributors. Any censorship that has been done has been for one and only one reason and it's protect the value of the platform. Primarily to advertisers, but also to users because users make the platform valuable. Decentralization deliberately cripples the main value of the platform (reach) in exchange for what exactly? Lack of moderation?
If you want decentralized, uncensorable communities, we solved that 30 years ago with usenet. Or, like you said, you can't be banned from email or running your own website. That's always been the case. People still write blogs. Yet Twitter sold for $44B and Tumblr was sold for $3M. Why? Because Twitter has reach.
And, conversely, optimizing platforms for advertising cripples them for the users. And there's a lot more users, so if this is an either-or, it's clear where the balance ought to be.
Email is still holding up, but realistically if Google, Microsoft and perhaps 2-3 other email hosts decided to collude and disallow any other email origins (let's say they would allow outgoing to them still) the majority of people's reaction to those complaining would be "just get yourself a gmail account".
>ealistically if Google, Microsoft and perhaps 2-3 other email hosts decided to collude and disallow any other email origins the majority of people's reaction to those complaining would be "just get yourself a gmail account".
That's exactly what these big email providers should do: just make a short list of allowed email hosts, including some governments and academic institutions and large corporations, and ban everything else. What are people going to do about it? Start running their own mail hosts? Hahaha. It would solve the spam problem quickly.
A better solution would be some kind of Email 3.0 system that's designed for better security and trustworthiness, but we've already proven it's nearly impossible to get people to adopt a new open standard, so we need to stick with a locked-down corporate solution run by an oligopoly.
> Hard disagree with this. Email is the example I give people of how federation could work.
That depends on how one looks at it. If spam and illegal content are considered, it may not be "working" in the sense a public service needs to be.
Email works because it's private, so the requirements are much looser; a large part of the article is how to solve the bad actors problem, which doesn't apply to email (well, it applies, but spam is more or less accepted as fact of life, while fake news etc. isn't - and it may never be, independenly of being right or wrong).
> You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system.
The platform may not be able to automatically enforce a ban, but you can still be banned via non-technical means. Not using email or the phone can be a condition of bail or parole, for example, like how Kevin Mitnick wasn't allowed (by court order) to use the telephone system in the early aughts.
>Lots of people have been banned from platforms, rightly or wrongly. You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system.
This right here is why I can't take anyone seriously who takes the free speech "issue" surrounding corporate platforms. There is no free speech on a platform, ever.
> Email is the example I give people of how federation could work.
Email being store-and-forward and therefore high-latency makes decentralization work reasonably well for email.
> You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do.
Sure you can. Your site/IPs can get RBLed. Hosting sites can refuse to do business with you. Network providers can refuse to do business with you. DNS registrars can refuse to do business with you. Search engines can deprioritize your site. These things happen less with personal sites than they do with mass social media accounts, but they happen, and eventually they will happen a lot more, and they'll happen to Mastodon instances, I'm sure.
None of your arguments address his main claim which is that decentralisation should be considered a means to an end and not an end in itself.
Which makes sense to me, if you just use a system it can be hard to tell for sure if it is centralised or not, which makes it an implementation detail not a feature. Though there are definitely features that are easier to guarantee in a decentralised system, as well as features that are easier to guarantee in a centralised system, so it makes sense to look at it as a trade-off.
> In the article itself, he points out that banking is decentralized and works wonderfully.
Except it isn't actually decentralized in the same sense as Mastodon is. You can't self-host a bank.
> He doesn't even mention email or phone service, both of which are decentralized and work well enough.
The same with phone service - it's not decentralized in this sense. You can't just run your own phone network, you can only choose from a single-digit number of major providers in your country, which are increasingly just multinationals.
The only reason banking and phone service may sometimes feel they're decentralized is because of the high interest governments have in them, and the copious amount of regulation in the industries that prevent the worst kinds of consolidation and abuse of power.
Email is, indeed, decentralized. And as many commenters already wrote, it's a disaster and a great example of how federated systems fail.
Email is only 1 to many of you know the addresses. There's no email "multicast" (unless servers support some kind of wildcard mailing list).
Mastodon is trying to support, like Twitter and most of social media, the one to many use case, which is incredibly hard to make distributed.
Calling email a good example is like saying SMS is a good example because you can join any carrier and message any number. It's a completely different use case.
> Email is the example I give people of how federation could work.
Why does this example keep coming up? Email is highly centralized these days. It is an example of how decentralized systems BECOME centralized. Not an example of how decentralized systems work. The centralization process here made email far easier to use and was critical to its mass adoption.
(centralization/decentralization is a spectrum obviously and not a binary option)
Sure, you can host your own email server. Doesn't mean your emails are going to actually reach anyone (i.e., GMail, Outlook, etc. email servers). There's not much point in self-hosting your Mastodon service if it's just you and a few of your buddies (might as well just have a private IRC channel).
> There's not much point in self-hosting your Mastodon service if it's just you and a few of your buddies
That would imply that you did something so gross that everybody blacklisted your server. Currently there's only a couple instances that are blocked everywhere, and those were used solely for spam or mass harassment I think – single user instances are fine.
But mail and Facebook/twitter/mastodon are different: one works on the principle of private message, the other work on the principle of agora. And emails grew organically with the web, not the others, it change a lot of things
It would be great if the author backed up, really, any of their points with some kind of demonstration about what they're talking about. This article otherwise is seemingly a bunch of handwaving about vague "problems" that exist but without actually clearly stating examples.
Also the author is flat out incorrect on this:
> This decentralization however came with a lot of challenges and today decentralized package hosting is no longer supported by the Python ecosystem.
pip has supported github urls for a long time.
edit Further:
> The second thing that became apparent over time was also that decentralized services came with a lot of security risks. Every one of those hosts allowed the re-publishing of already existing packages. Domains that lapsed could be re-registered by other people and new packages could be placed there.
Linux package management systems solved the decentralization "problem" years ago. It's why there's so many mirrors available when you download packages. Signed packages, and even "trusted-source" checksums can provide for integrity in cases where decentralization exists.
That some package managers threw this away in favour of monolithic repositories is kind of irrelevant to how ActivityPub works.
setuptools used to be able to pull packages published to the index from external URLs. Support for this was removed many years ago. Also you cannot publish packages to PyPI that reference dependencies on GitHub.
About the rest of your points on package indexes I believe I addressed them in the post already.
It's hardly the entire ecosystem, which is my point. Decentralization is there already and well-supported in the provided tools. You just can't abuse the official PyPI sources, and that's a reasonable approach.
The article goes into some details beyond scaling that I can resonate with. I had a few forums and IRC servers in the past that grew rather large. I eventually shut them down, not because of scalability but because of legal liability and dealing with the myriad of personality issues that put my domains at risk. Scaling a forum or IRC to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people is not hard especially nowadays with cloud scaling and the current state of modern kernels and hardware.
What I found too challenging was having to moderate the content and finding moderators that could be trusted to remove illegal content in a timely manor. Worse, there were trolls that would use bots to post highly illegal material and then automatically submit their own posts to my registrars, server providers and government. The bots somehow even grabbed screenshots right after they posted content. I say bots because there was no way a human to perform their actions so quickly. This was a losing battle and I did not have the legal resources to deal with it, nor the development resources to play the cat and mouse arms race 24/7. I do have my own conspiracy theories as to who these bot owners were but that doesn't matter any more. Nowadays I could probably block more of those bots with techniques I have learned but I just do not have the desire to get back into that quagmire.
I suspect some of the Mastodon admins will learn this lesson with time. They, like me, will probably start in a state of denial and dismiss the risk until it gets real. And it certainly gets real.
The only technical work around I could find was to set forums to make all posts moderator-approved, meaning only the poster can see their post until a moderator approves it. This does not scale and people want their posts to be instantly available. With IRC I had to constantly add new file sharing domains to word filters to block the links to illegal material and that was also a losing battle.
[Edit] BeefWellington brings up a good point. I should add that I am referring to public instances of forums and IRC servers that anyone may join. Private servers are at much lower risk assuming the trusted members are good at setting strong passwords and static content is not accessible at all without an account and Mastodon servers are not linked to lesser trusted or non-private instances.
> I suspect some of the Mastodon admins will learn this lesson with time.
I doubt it. A lot of the new instances are invitation-only, and the point of Federation is I can just run my own instance and seek out the content I desire. I don't have to let anyone else onto my instance.
I can see that working. Private instances that only invite truly trustworthy people are probably much lower risk, the only risk being account take-over and the static files are are not accessible by bots then the bar is set much higher.
I should clarify that I was referring to forums and IRC servers that anyone could join. The Mastodon model in this case would be public instances that are not strictly private and are linked to other instances. Private instances would be much safer. The risk of linked instances would map to the weakest link.
That's ONE point of federation, but the other is cross-instance discovery and communication. If that part is underused (blocked, disabled), there's very little point in using Mastodon. You can recreate this everywhere, including at Twitter, Reddit, Discord.
Mastodon is quicksand. Instances are not guaranteed to keep existing, they depend entirely on a citizen running it, scaling it, and paying for all that, often with the help of donations. Even a relatively small influx of new users may pose an existential financial threat for the instance, or a lock so that nobody new can join.
Even when things are running "normally", instance owners may simply quit. Further, did you know that almost every instance regularly purges all media attached to toots?
Your instance, content within it, account you created within it, the media attached to your toots, are all incredibly fragile and can disappear at any time. The main Mastodon scaling approach: creating lots of small instances, makes this problem worse, not better. You're just spreading fragility.
You don't have this insecurity at Twitter, not at this fundamental level. Twitter pretty much auto-scales and your content is not lost. Sure, people may get banned, but a normy user would normally not face these existential issues.
The other thing that scales poorly is moderation. Twitter is sometimes perceived as being inconsistent in its rules (or biased), but this is a 100 times worse on Mastodon. Every instance has their own arbitrary and ever-changing rules. The same applies to federation. Instance mods regularly block federation with other instances based on arbitrary decisions.
Technically, the UX is inconsistent. One instance may work well whilst the other has page loads into the 10 seconds, or federated content delayed by hours.
Doesn't scale, fragile, and deeply inconsistent. It has a place and I still consider Mastodon an accomplishment. But it should not be compared with any of the centralized services.
>Your instance, content within it, account you created within it, the media attached to your toots, are all incredibly fragile and can disappear at any time
You realize of course that this is true of any platform? You do have this kind of insecurity with Twitter as we are seeing in real time. Musk has already stated that he wants to reduce Twitter's infrastructure costs, he could decide that all content older than N years is being discarded, even more easily than he discarded half of Twitter's workforce.
These insecurities are not at the same level, and do not compare. Don't see it as the difference between zero security and infinite security, it's a spectrum or scale instead.
On FB, I can go back 10 years and my content is still there. All of it. With the exception of a suspension, FB doesn't delete user content. Ever. The same applies to Twitter. Their track record of content persistence is excellent.
On Mastodon, media gets purged pretty much by policy. So you can be sure that you lose it all, thus rendering old toots useless. Add to this that every instance can disappear at any time, so besides your content, your account is also not safe.
What Musk could and could not decide is speculation. Track record looks back, not forward.
I don't believe any large service is more stable in the long term than a small one. To put it morbidly, all will be dust eventually. At least mastodon has account migration baked in.
Additionally, why would I want all my content to last forever? If I want something to last forever I'll carve it on a rock, not toot it.
Pretty much everything else you listed is a positive.
There's quite a lot of wiggle room between short term volatility and a concept like "forever". If you take it as far as "we'll all die anyway", you might as well not post anything, ever, anywhere.
Large central services give reasonable stability as to not easily shut down altogether, having your account and all content removed. On Mastodon, this is a constant threat.
I ran head into the first one. Back in August my instance owner announced they was going to be shutting down. Gave me plenty of time to move, and while followers and people you're following are easy to move, your content really isn't.
Perhaps that's for the best? Perhaps social media in the microblogging style should be considered ephemera.
I'm putting myself in the shoes of a common Twitter user. To exaggerate a little, they are spoiled and have zero tolerance for friction.
Look at all the complaints regarding onboarding. They are forced to pick a server and many directly stop at that, loudly complaining. Two days to wait for an activation email? Unacceptable.
As for content preservation, I get what you're saying. At the same time, I do believe that people are not used to the idea that their old media is purposefully deleted, automatically. Or that their toots and instance account can disappear at will. Those are new concepts and frictions when coming from a central platform.
To illustrate that point, Facebook has multiple giant data centers that host nothing but stale content. That pic you posted 7 years ago, it's over there. You will absolutely never ever look at it again, but in case you do...it's there. These massive investments underpin my idea that users expect their content to be persisted. If this wasn't important, Facebook would not do this.
I think the complexity of content preservation is that social media has various uses. You can chit-chat and use it as a casual conversation tool, yet others use it as a broadcast channel. Some may use it for record-keeping. Creators may build up a portfolio of rich media posts. Some people may be fine with the chit-chat deleted, but for many other uses it would be not acceptable at all.
Don't get hung up on the word "guarantee" and make this a question of absolutes. The question is whether you would bet on your content still being on twitter vs still being on Bob's server X years from now. And the answer is that you would definitely bet the farm on twitter, no matter what X is.
That's an architectural problem with Mastodon, and can probably be fixed. But twitter has it solved by acting as a sort of well-established, large data bank; a place where you store your tweet data. Going to a Mastodon instance is like going to a tiny credit union, if credit unions weren't regulated in any way.
In the '00s, phpBB forums and IRC were popular, but the Internet far less hostile for users. Even bigger challenges will come when instance operators are asked to comply with local law, requiring them to have privacy policies, t&cs and enforce these alongside regulations like GDPR.
Fully agree. Hobbyist moderators currently do moderation at-will. They may have a day job, go on a holiday, and of course they sleep. Without having several moderators across time zones, everything you said might become an existential issue, especially on larger and open instances.
And to add insult to injury, better anti-harassment features are near impossible to implement because of the nature of federation. Other instances may run an older version, or simply chose to ignore your new rules.
If and when Mastodon grows to the size as becoming interesting for many mass scale harassment attacks, the only logical way out is to disable the federation part more and more. Which means you basically end up with tiny centralized bubbles. For which you could have simply created a subreddit or Discord, for free.
I get what you're saying, but you're missing some important aspects.
I wasn't commenting on the quality of moderation, instead on the scalability. Instance owners are easily overwhelmed and this problem gets worse as things grow.
Second, if your point is to create a tightly-moderated instance bubble, then Mastodon's federation features will largely go unused. If that is the outcome, then there's no point to Mastodon. You can recreate such spaces everywhere, for free.
You're the second person to reply with this "forever" take. I never said forever, I'm talking about normal timelines where users on central networks expect their content to persist, which is what typically is the case.
And for the record, Mastodon content is stored on the Great Servers in the Cloud. Most instances run on AWS VPS.
Some of these arguments start on really odd premises:
> Imagine you're a rather small server and suddenly Eli Lilly and Company joins your instance. Today they have around 140K followers on Twitter and they are a publicly traded company. First of all with an account that large, every one of their posts will cause a lot of load on your infrastructure. Secondly though, they are a very interesting target to attack.
Why would Eli Lilly join some small instance? Why wouldn't they make their own instance? They have their own email and website after all. why be lilly@someoneelse.social when they could just be their own thing?
Sorta? There's nothing stopping a spammer from registering and running their own instance+user of @social@elilillypad.com, or any other variation that brandsight hasn't thought to register.
Because it's not worth the effort. If anything, there are going to a commercial providers that run servers for companies in a bundled way where all of their clients use their servers. But more likely, they won't bother at all with this, because it's not an important part of their business.
And then the big public instance decides it's not worth even federating with small folks because if you block them they will come to your instance because you have "content" - a bunch of big names that use it - and also display their site's ads to them.
There are several issues here: finding, identity, storage, and delivery. They're somewhat separable.
Finding is "where do I go to get X". We have URLs, which assume a specific server. There are content-based keys, such as DOIs and URIs and hashes. But how do you find where the info is stored? Google? Something like DNS? Something else? This is the hardest problem. What Youtube really sells is "discovery" not streaming hosting. There are lots of streaming services, but you won't get the views.
Identity has all the usual problems. If people can create lots of identities at low cost, there will be spam and worse. No good answers there. China has this fixed, but they don't do anonymity. You need a government ID to connect to anything.
Storage is the big cost problem. Where does all this stuff go, and who pays for it? IPFS was supposed to be the distributed answer to this, and Filecoin was supposed to be the way to pay for it. That didn't work out. On the other hand, if someone wants it out there, then maybe they have to pay to store one copy.
Delivery can be distributed, but do you want to? Bittorrent was the prototype. Peertube is another peer to peer way to do it. Each video has a home server, and large numbers of people watching the same thing won't overload it because anyone watching the video also serves it. It works OK but is not as smooth an experience as YouTube. Plus it runs down your battery and runs up your bandwidth usage. Bandwidth is much cheaper in data center bulk than out at the end of a cell connection. Maybe do something like that but with ISP level caching servers, all serving each other. Sort of like Cloudflare / Akamai.
> Storage is the big cost problem. Where does all this stuff go, and who pays for it? IPFS was supposed to be the distributed answer to this, and Filecoin was supposed to be the way to pay for it. That didn't work out. On the other hand, if someone wants it out there, then maybe they have to pay to store one copy.
> That didn't work out.
Can you expand on this point? At my end, IPFS runs along just fine: My IPFS instance in particular continues to serve its content without much fuss. For Filecoin, the content hosted there is still on the network, there's just much less speculative fervor surrounding it & other networks like it.
Thank you, this is constructive. Let me complement with some more details:
Privacy. Messages in a private chat or group should not be visible to the operator or others. This likely necessitates e2ee, but it's possible that some multi-party protocol could protect from malicious operators without going full on e2ee (difficult on web).
Integrity: you don't want rogue operators to be able to falsify content. While you can't stop any website from faking content, you can stop it from propagating by having signatures and verifying them.
Availability: you should be able to post and fetch at all times, which necessitates aggressive caching. Signatures (from above) are useful here, because you can use untrusted storage layers.
Security: how do you prevent an instance operator from stealing your account or posting on your behalf.
Abuse: no system is anywhere near perfect, but the ones that come close are extremely centralized and use fingerprinting and behavior analysis. We probably don't want that, so what else?
Note that all of these are deeply tied into the identity problem. We would really need a form of PKI for real people (but without exposing real world identity). If people actually control their private keys, all of the above is greatly simplified. But even in defi, where custody of your private keys have a HUGE direct monetary value, most people don't want/know/care to set it up. So we have huge challenges.
> I have a lot of thoughts on this that are too long for a Tweet or Toot. Since some of my followers asked though I decided do a longform version of this
People should leave Twitter and start blogs so that they can talk about more complex things with more nuance
What you need, really, is centralized "big squares" where people can talk about limited topics with strong oversight (think: HN) but they can link too off-site spaces where smaller groups can have their own rules and topics.
I know some of these types of groups, and I don't really publicize them, because the people who would fit in will find them, no need to grow to world-wide size.
Readit News
The point of mastodon is not that big companies will join small volunteer-run instances. They can run their own mastodon servers, just like they run their own mail servers and chat servers (or, more accurately, they outsource running their own mail and chat servers to Google and slack).
The right place for ActivityPub to land is that businesses and institutions will host their own (or pay a SaaS offering to do it for them, like they do with email and their CMS today), individuals will sign up to shared services (like you sign up with gmail for email, or blogger.com to blog).
The problem is going to be holding the barbarians at bay. All the same stuff we have to do for email will need to be deployed: Community blocklists for misbehaving servers, IP reputation, ML spam detection…
And funding it will require cash which the adtech industry will spiral in and offer to provide. ‘Federate with our servers and we’ll pay you 1c for every message you allow us to post to your users…’ Server admins will resist for a while but eventually, the walls will crack.
Enjoy it while it lasts, this burst of old school volunteer-run internet. It won’t survive this eternal September. It never does. As the architect of the Matrix said: Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it
https://masto.host/
There’s also an open and active GitHub issue on mastodon discussing how to separate server hosting from domain name so you can point DNS at an existing instance and use it from that domain: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
Many thanks to my friend on twitter for pointing me to both of these: https://twitter.com/__jesse_li/status/1592006641897320448
>Mastodon by Teams (tm), please log in with your active directory credentials to see the latest posts from HR!
I have only heard the best about masto.host but they have closed subscriptions for now (which only speaks for them IMHO). I have personal experience with Ossrox and Weingärtner IT, they are both excellent and I can recommend them without hesitation. I have no affiliation with any of those companies except being a customer of the later two.
EDIT: The price of a small instance is less than a Twitter subscription. So, if you want your own instance - which as pros and cons - nothing is holding you back.
[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard
The two smartest people in this business are Yishan Wong and Ellen Pao.
Not really. Email and ActivityPub are radically different in one way that makes all the difference: AP is whitelist-based (follows).
> Federate with our servers and we’ll pay you 1c for every message you allow us to post to your users...
And this is a fine model - much better than all the power concentrated in one stagnant entity that forbids everyone else from participating, extending or improving.
This is perhaps my biggest regret. I've ignored Mastodon because it seem too much like a PITA to deal with. Now I've been looking at it more seriously, but so has everybody else who's on Twitter, so by the time I get there it's going to be... Twitter pre Musk. This isn't really that appealing. Coulda woulda shoulda, etc., but I just wasn't paying enough attention at the right time. Rather like Bitcoin. Don't get me started.
It's not like torrents and likes of PirateBay that make downloading movies easy. It's very complex to get into the network. It's like Mastodon is trying to not let you in.
Also, on Mastodon you will only see what you explicitly follow. You won't even see the rabble unless you go looking for it.
While the verification green check mark is nice, it is much better to have PR hosted on toot.company.com instead.
Furthermore, there's the "who can see what" - https://restoreprivacy.com/mastodon-privacy-issues-risks/
> Because these messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted, the server owner can read everything in plaintext.
(See also https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 )
That's a BIG "companies should be hosting their own servers."
Wil joined what was at the time my own home instance, following something of a flameout on Twitter, itself caused by 1) people harassing him there, 2) Wil employing a shared, user-generated blocklist which 3) by both its own size and celeb-driven adoption rendered many other Twitter accounts effectively blocked --- not by Twitter, but as a result of individual adoptions of that blocklist. How legitimate inclusions were, and/or how feasible it was to get off the blocklist, I really can't say. That said, Wil arrived on Mastodon with both a large fan and foe base.
Harassment of Wil began on Mastodon.
<https://www.theglobaldispatch.com/mastadon-shuts-down-wil-wh...>
The admin/moderator was ... less than transparent or capable, and responded to a case of "this profile is causing me problems" by banning that profile rather than seeking out the root cause of the griefers who'd in fact triggered the problem.
<https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635779449174251>
Ultimate, Wil left Mastodon as well, writing his own account of the matter:
<https://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place...>
Mastodon's evolved its own tools and practices (both technically and as a community, including a community of admins), and should perform better in future, though much engineering progress emerges through pain, suffering, or worse.
Wil is, in the world of celebrity, fairly modest stakes. I've heard tales of Twitter that there was a point where it could only handle a tweet from one major celeb (e.g., Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, or one of the 'dashians) at a time, and effectively had servers dedicated to sufficiently large accounts. Celebrities proved an interesting stress-testing mechanism.
Mastodon ... has not yet experienced this, and I've my concerns with how well it might handle such scaling, or what specific elements of scaling (users, instances, posts, interactions, ...) will prove most problematic. I've certainly seen and heard of numerous cases of growing pains over the past few weeks, though nothing insurmountable.
But:
1. Celebs and brands are profile types that should be considered.
2. Mastodon's had some experience and performed poorly, both technically and culturally.
3. Adding very-high-profile profiles to the network needs some consideration. It's quite likely that there will be poorly-thought-through adoptions in future, however.
... but then a bunch of guys in stormtrooper outfits start showing up every day and the trekkies start fighting with them and the cops are getting called out and pretty much eventually the owner is going to ask Mr. Wheaton to stop coming by.
And because it's just someone else's café, he pretty much has to do that.
The good news is, going to that café is not the only way for him to participate in the fediverse. He is the proud owner and operator of wilwheaton.net, and he can point that at his own activitypub server, that nobody can kick him off. He can bulk block all stormtroopers, interact with the trekkies in the café, and handle his own bandwidth and compute bills for delivering his content to all his fans.
Bonus: the fact he's posting from @wil@wilwheaton.net acts as a pretty solid cast iron guarantee of authenticity, that you are dealing with the one and only actual Wil Wheaton.
Meanwhile, Stephen King is sat at the café down the road trying to figure out why the new owner there wants him to pay him $8 a month to have the owner keep telling people who walk in 'yep, that's the real Stephen King over there'.
To my understanding, there were further complicating factors involved beyond just "scaling":
- At the time I heard that the mastodon.cloud instance admins and moderators spoke English as a second language (it was started to primarily focus on Japanese Mastodon, to my understanding), which added an accidental language barrier to the challenge of moderating that many reports (and being able to seek out a "root cause of the griefers")
- I still don't know how to make sense of the whole counter.social thing and Wil's supposed involvement there (which happened before the mastodon.cloud incident). I think it was partly a scam that accidentally honey trapped Wil with very bad timing, but he doesn't refer to it directly in his own account, only obliquely, so I don't think we know an answer for sure. (Only what I observed in federated Meta drama from a tiny instance at the time.) But to my understanding it still relates to some of the root causes of some of the grievances. (counter.social is a now entirely defederated instance with alt-Right associations and markets itself as "safe" and "secure" and "celebrity friendly" and "InfoSec focused" and is run by an admin referred to most commonly as "The Jester", seemingly somewhat in homage to/love for Batman's nemesis The Joker.) I can't imagine knowing the full facts ahead of time that Wil would have ever chosen to associate with that sort of instance on purpose, but I can understand (some) of why once accidentally associated with that sort of instance it caused some lasting grievances.
But does this really address that issue? I see this as an attack vector really. Let's say Elon isn't happy with the competition. He can join a small server and force them to either increase hosting fees or to shut down. That's really the point of the author's comment and the relationship to scaling.
Please correct my misunderstanding.
What's the problem there, if you know all your users have corporate-mandated spam-blockers installed that will drop the spam they're paying you to forward?
Who was, by the way, an homage to Vint Cerf, creator of TCP/IP.
Isn’t that a protection racket?
Hard disagree with this. Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. You can use any email provider and interact with any other email provider effortlessly. This is undeniably an improvement over internal direct messages within a centralized service (i.e. Facebook or Twitter DMs). If you leave facebook, you leave your contact list and message history. On email, if using a custom domain, you can switch email providers or even host your own server without anybody on your contact list even having to know this occurred.
Lots of people have been banned from platforms, rightly or wrongly. You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do.
> On the topic of moderation the very same issue is even more absurd. Some instances want uncontrolled free speech where some instances effectively are pure shit-posting instances which are completely de-federated from the most of the fediverse as a result. Other instances really like to control their content, where some popular ones such as fosstodon ban all languages than English as a result to allow moderation.
These are talked about as problems, rather than being the primary selling point.
The problem starts here. Not many people who are not tech savvy even know what a custom domain is. Let alone having an email with a custom domain.
> You can't get banned from email
Ask people who get locked out of their gmail account.
What we techies miss is that there are more people who don't understand technology and are not willing to spend time learning about it as they have other more important things to do. Tech is just one of the tools they are using to get their tasks done. We cannot expect people to spend time understanding everything about tech. It is not surprising that it took a commercial company with aggressive behaviour when it comes to controlling users data to put BSD on regular non-tech consumer desktops. And why Microsoft Windows succeeded in being on regular consumers desktop OS whereas commercial Linux-based OS struggled; and the company that successful put Linux on mobile devices also has quite a record when it comes to users data.
We techies can talk a lot about decentralisation and owning data. But the regular non-tech users really don't care. They just want simple things done quickly using tech and get on with their lives.
Recently I saw videos from multiple news channels on how to use Mastodon. They were at pains to explain to users how there are multiple servers and one has to choose a server, which is run by individuals or organisations. And if the server goes down then the user has to move to another server. Regular non-tech users really don't want to get into this complexity. Has anyone ever seen TV channels explain with great effort how to use Twitter?
> Ask people who get locked out of their gmail account.
And, from the other end, ask people who actually self-host e-mail - not just own the domain, but also run their own mail server. The anti-spam measures of major e-mail providers are, in practice, banning insufficiently determined self-hosters from e-mail.
I also know how to bake my own bread, but I'd rather get it from the store.
Completely self-run email is a bad user experience, just like making my own bread. Most people here forget that people want convenience over anything else.
I'll go stronger than that: if your theory is that people should want to be their own sysadmin, and people who don't want to be a sysadmin don't deserve [a thing] then your theory is bad and you should feel bad.
I would point out that the concept is really no different from how ISPs work, and yet the public seems to have wrangled with that one.
Deleted Comment
Except e-mail has been a total failure when it comes to spam/abuse, and in practice it isn't this federated, decentralized paradise at all -- virtually everyone I know uses Gmail for their personal account. And if you want to run your own server, good luck getting Gmail to accept your e-mails at all.
And if you can't get Gmail to trust your server, that's pretty much a ban for all practical purposes.
The point is that they can and do because the system is not, in fact, centralized.
Also, judged only on the volume of spam and abuse, many systems besides email -- decentralized and centralized alike -- could be called a "total failure." And yet somehow these systems remain stable and functional and useful.
I've been using my own domain for my email for over two decades. In that time it's been self-hosted, hosted with Google, and hosted with Fastmail. I control it, so I can take it wherever I want. I've been able to take my full message history with me too.
It has not been a "total failure" with spam/abuse either, though I'm glad to have Fastmail handle that for me these days.
In any case, I'll take the tradeoffs over a centralized system.
Which, ironically enough, is the answer to everyone’s problems with mastodon.
Does everyone you know use gmail for their business accounts?
Does absolutely, 100% of the people you know use gmail for personal accounts?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say no to both the above.
There’s no reason mastodon has to be everyone runs their own server just like everyone doesn’t have to run their email server today. People use the company server for work stuff and fluffycat233575@yahoo.com for personal stuff.
I don’t know if it’s just the HN bubble but all people post is why it can’t (or shouldn’t, because, get off my lawn) work. It’s like people have a vested interest in making sure non-adtech doesn’t succeed, almost like their very livelihoods depended on it.
—edit—
And, back in the day, spam filtering was something you had to do on your own or just dealt with all the spam. The big email providers became big in part because they solved that problem for most everyone. In ‘97 nobody (OK, nobody but the US postal service) was saying there needed to be this gigantic corporation monitoring everyone’s emails for wrongthink or only a central entity could solve the spam problem. People just bucked down and solved the problem enough to get a sizable portion of the population using email…I’m genuinely curious if there’s ever been a technology with higher uptake than email now.
Beyond that, Twitter is rife with spam, scams, and tons of other abuse. So is Facebook. So is reddit. The fact that email doesn't work that way doesn't matter.
Regardless, I don't think it's contradictory that people flock towards a somewhat-centralized system like Gmail; the point is that it still supports an open protocol. The fact that Protonmail "just works" when emailing Gmail is a testament to the fact that federation can work in practice, even if it does start becoming more centralized.
So the net number of spam emails in my email inbox is less than 1 per week. On Twitter, for me it's at least 1 per day and there's nothing I can do to tweak the filtering.
I still can, but only because I hate myself enough to run my own email for more than 20 years, so there must be some magic field of trust somewhere in the background. I wouldn't start from scratch though.
Less flippant, very few companies except startups and one person shops use GMail in Germany. I'm no fan of Outlook and Exchange, but that doesn't mean I can just ignore it away.
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437
Deleted Comment
It's a total nightmare out there!
I have clients on big Hosts like SiteGround, and sending email is a problem!
I'm 100% in support of the idea that services should be protocols though! :-)
This problem is so bad that's it's driven a quiet de facto re-centralization of email.
Usenet is another example of the problems with 0 moderation and federation. Sure, it distributed amazingly (many ISPs mirrored usenet data), but once spammers started spamming, it quickly died as a discourse medium.
Those with concerns over censorship need to face the fact that we've previously had 100% censorship free platforms and nobody uses them anymore. We dumped those platforms because of the lack of censoring, not in spite of it.
Heck, HN is moderated as well, I don't think most of us would be here if it was unmoderated.
Deleted Comment
The Mastodon implementation of this is legitimately flawed.
The issue is you need users to be independent of servers.
That isn't hard to implement. Make the user ID in the protocol the user's public key and user@domain is just a human-friendly pointer. If you transition from user@a to user@b, your pointer changes -- or you can use both for an indeterminate amount of time -- but the public key stays the same and so everyone who followed you or signed up for your feed still sees it.
The current implementation is broken for multiple reasons.
First, it makes you have to care who is hosting you, because if they become adversarial or go out of business or you become large enough to want to self-host, you lose your account. That shouldn't happen.
Second, with users tied to hosts, it becomes "convenient" for hosts ban entire other hosts, which is poison because it's the dynamic that led to the bulk of email moving to GMail and Outlook. Once providers are big enough they can ban smaller ones ("for spam filtering") to exclude competitors. The protocol needs to prevent this by making the host fungible. Not doing so is a significant design flaw.
Why didn't the architects of Mastodon think of this stuff before? It should have been pretty obvious that people might want to move their accounts between servers. But now, they'll *never* be able to. The only way it can happen is if someone creates an entirely different social network like Mastodon and somehow gets everyone to switch to that instead, but it's probably too late now.
If you're on Google or spamhaus's blacklist, you're effectively banned.
Yes, a specific server or address can be "banned". But there is nothing stopping you from just opening another gmail / yahoo / whatevermail account.
In other words, Gmail is the most popular email provider because it's in Google's interest to have people be logged in all the time so they can personalize search results, so that incentivizes them to make a very good email system and then give it away for free. Giving something good away for free because you gain indirect benefits via some other business will rapidly centralize more or less anything, which is why there are at least theoretically rules against market dumping and tying (which aren't really enforced in the software world, but that's another matter).
We can imagine a parallel universe in which search is far more competitive, with lower margins, and thus Google couldn't financially justify subsidizing consumer Gmail for so many years. In such a world it's likely that there'd be more players, perhaps they wouldn't be as good but there'd likely be more of them, there'd probably be companies that specialized in selling spam filtering tech to them and it'd look more federated than what we have today.
Freedom doesn't mean the requirement to spend the community's resources propagating material that the community agrees is harmful or objectionable. That would be the opposite of freedom.
The ability to refuse actors that the community doesn't want to spend resources on is essential to freedom.
Every actor has the freedom to choose whether to conform to community norms, or to form their own communities with different norms.
* People don't need nu-Twitter to be perfectly reliable they way they do for mail
* For that matter, nu-Twitter doesn't really need to be a unified namespace; it can be less coherent even than email addressing and still add value, the way RSS feeds did.
* In the years before Google centralized all of email, it was pretty common for people to have multiple email identities on different services, which seems like the worst this is going to get.
I don't love the software, and the user experience definitely isn't ready for prime time yet, but the basic model seems workable?
[0] https://delta.chat/en/
From me as well.
> You can use any email provider and interact with any other email provider effortlessly. This is undeniably an improvement over internal direct messages within a centralized service
But the general public went for siloed systems instead.
So I’d say you or me want decentralization, but I don’t think that holds true in general.
And yet some former Twitter users have identified why this is a problem, and are now moving back towards a decentralized platform. It's why scaling Mastadon is even a topic right now.
If there's anything to be learned from the KiwiFarms saga, it's that these statements are no longer true.
That presupposes that federation is actually a goal and not a means to an end. It's amazing how great developers are at not understanding what creates value. Twitter's value is _reach_. Get 400M users in one place, hook them with interesting content, server them ads, nudge them to sign up, track their engagement to make the platform sticky and attract more contributors. Any censorship that has been done has been for one and only one reason and it's protect the value of the platform. Primarily to advertisers, but also to users because users make the platform valuable. Decentralization deliberately cripples the main value of the platform (reach) in exchange for what exactly? Lack of moderation?
If you want decentralized, uncensorable communities, we solved that 30 years ago with usenet. Or, like you said, you can't be banned from email or running your own website. That's always been the case. People still write blogs. Yet Twitter sold for $44B and Tumblr was sold for $3M. Why? Because Twitter has reach.
That's exactly what these big email providers should do: just make a short list of allowed email hosts, including some governments and academic institutions and large corporations, and ban everything else. What are people going to do about it? Start running their own mail hosts? Hahaha. It would solve the spam problem quickly.
A better solution would be some kind of Email 3.0 system that's designed for better security and trustworthiness, but we've already proven it's nearly impossible to get people to adopt a new open standard, so we need to stick with a locked-down corporate solution run by an oligopoly.
That is the reaction now when issues with self-hosting email are brought up.
That depends on how one looks at it. If spam and illegal content are considered, it may not be "working" in the sense a public service needs to be.
Email works because it's private, so the requirements are much looser; a large part of the article is how to solve the bad actors problem, which doesn't apply to email (well, it applies, but spam is more or less accepted as fact of life, while fake news etc. isn't - and it may never be, independenly of being right or wrong).
By that standard, centralized social networks have utterly failed us as well.
The platform may not be able to automatically enforce a ban, but you can still be banned via non-technical means. Not using email or the phone can be a condition of bail or parole, for example, like how Kevin Mitnick wasn't allowed (by court order) to use the telephone system in the early aughts.
This right here is why I can't take anyone seriously who takes the free speech "issue" surrounding corporate platforms. There is no free speech on a platform, ever.
Email being store-and-forward and therefore high-latency makes decentralization work reasonably well for email.
> You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do.
Sure you can. Your site/IPs can get RBLed. Hosting sites can refuse to do business with you. Network providers can refuse to do business with you. DNS registrars can refuse to do business with you. Search engines can deprioritize your site. These things happen less with personal sites than they do with mass social media accounts, but they happen, and eventually they will happen a lot more, and they'll happen to Mastodon instances, I'm sure.
Which makes sense to me, if you just use a system it can be hard to tell for sure if it is centralised or not, which makes it an implementation detail not a feature. Though there are definitely features that are easier to guarantee in a decentralised system, as well as features that are easier to guarantee in a centralised system, so it makes sense to look at it as a trade-off.
He doesn't even mention email or phone service, both of which are decentralized and work well enough.
Except it isn't actually decentralized in the same sense as Mastodon is. You can't self-host a bank.
> He doesn't even mention email or phone service, both of which are decentralized and work well enough.
The same with phone service - it's not decentralized in this sense. You can't just run your own phone network, you can only choose from a single-digit number of major providers in your country, which are increasingly just multinationals.
The only reason banking and phone service may sometimes feel they're decentralized is because of the high interest governments have in them, and the copious amount of regulation in the industries that prevent the worst kinds of consolidation and abuse of power.
Email is, indeed, decentralized. And as many commenters already wrote, it's a disaster and a great example of how federated systems fail.
Mastodon is trying to support, like Twitter and most of social media, the one to many use case, which is incredibly hard to make distributed.
Calling email a good example is like saying SMS is a good example because you can join any carrier and message any number. It's a completely different use case.
Sure there is? You can add as many recipients as you want.
Why does this example keep coming up? Email is highly centralized these days. It is an example of how decentralized systems BECOME centralized. Not an example of how decentralized systems work. The centralization process here made email far easier to use and was critical to its mass adoption.
(centralization/decentralization is a spectrum obviously and not a binary option)
Sure, you can host your own email server. Doesn't mean your emails are going to actually reach anyone (i.e., GMail, Outlook, etc. email servers). There's not much point in self-hosting your Mastodon service if it's just you and a few of your buddies (might as well just have a private IRC channel).
But the website, telephone analogies stand.
That would imply that you did something so gross that everybody blacklisted your server. Currently there's only a couple instances that are blocked everywhere, and those were used solely for spam or mass harassment I think – single user instances are fine.
If your domain gets added to blocklists from gmail/outlook/spamhaus you basically are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30222736
You must have missed the Kiwifarms controversy.
Also the author is flat out incorrect on this:
> This decentralization however came with a lot of challenges and today decentralized package hosting is no longer supported by the Python ecosystem.
pip has supported github urls for a long time.
edit Further:
> The second thing that became apparent over time was also that decentralized services came with a lot of security risks. Every one of those hosts allowed the re-publishing of already existing packages. Domains that lapsed could be re-registered by other people and new packages could be placed there.
Linux package management systems solved the decentralization "problem" years ago. It's why there's so many mirrors available when you download packages. Signed packages, and even "trusted-source" checksums can provide for integrity in cases where decentralization exists.
That some package managers threw this away in favour of monolithic repositories is kind of irrelevant to how ActivityPub works.
> pip has supported github urls for a long time.
setuptools used to be able to pull packages published to the index from external URLs. Support for this was removed many years ago. Also you cannot publish packages to PyPI that reference dependencies on GitHub.
About the rest of your points on package indexes I believe I addressed them in the post already.
It's hardly the entire ecosystem, which is my point. Decentralization is there already and well-supported in the provided tools. You just can't abuse the official PyPI sources, and that's a reasonable approach.
What I found too challenging was having to moderate the content and finding moderators that could be trusted to remove illegal content in a timely manor. Worse, there were trolls that would use bots to post highly illegal material and then automatically submit their own posts to my registrars, server providers and government. The bots somehow even grabbed screenshots right after they posted content. I say bots because there was no way a human to perform their actions so quickly. This was a losing battle and I did not have the legal resources to deal with it, nor the development resources to play the cat and mouse arms race 24/7. I do have my own conspiracy theories as to who these bot owners were but that doesn't matter any more. Nowadays I could probably block more of those bots with techniques I have learned but I just do not have the desire to get back into that quagmire.
I suspect some of the Mastodon admins will learn this lesson with time. They, like me, will probably start in a state of denial and dismiss the risk until it gets real. And it certainly gets real.
The only technical work around I could find was to set forums to make all posts moderator-approved, meaning only the poster can see their post until a moderator approves it. This does not scale and people want their posts to be instantly available. With IRC I had to constantly add new file sharing domains to word filters to block the links to illegal material and that was also a losing battle.
[Edit] BeefWellington brings up a good point. I should add that I am referring to public instances of forums and IRC servers that anyone may join. Private servers are at much lower risk assuming the trusted members are good at setting strong passwords and static content is not accessible at all without an account and Mastodon servers are not linked to lesser trusted or non-private instances.
I doubt it. A lot of the new instances are invitation-only, and the point of Federation is I can just run my own instance and seek out the content I desire. I don't have to let anyone else onto my instance.
I should clarify that I was referring to forums and IRC servers that anyone could join. The Mastodon model in this case would be public instances that are not strictly private and are linked to other instances. Private instances would be much safer. The risk of linked instances would map to the weakest link.
Mastodon is quicksand. Instances are not guaranteed to keep existing, they depend entirely on a citizen running it, scaling it, and paying for all that, often with the help of donations. Even a relatively small influx of new users may pose an existential financial threat for the instance, or a lock so that nobody new can join.
Even when things are running "normally", instance owners may simply quit. Further, did you know that almost every instance regularly purges all media attached to toots?
Your instance, content within it, account you created within it, the media attached to your toots, are all incredibly fragile and can disappear at any time. The main Mastodon scaling approach: creating lots of small instances, makes this problem worse, not better. You're just spreading fragility.
You don't have this insecurity at Twitter, not at this fundamental level. Twitter pretty much auto-scales and your content is not lost. Sure, people may get banned, but a normy user would normally not face these existential issues.
The other thing that scales poorly is moderation. Twitter is sometimes perceived as being inconsistent in its rules (or biased), but this is a 100 times worse on Mastodon. Every instance has their own arbitrary and ever-changing rules. The same applies to federation. Instance mods regularly block federation with other instances based on arbitrary decisions.
Technically, the UX is inconsistent. One instance may work well whilst the other has page loads into the 10 seconds, or federated content delayed by hours.
Doesn't scale, fragile, and deeply inconsistent. It has a place and I still consider Mastodon an accomplishment. But it should not be compared with any of the centralized services.
You realize of course that this is true of any platform? You do have this kind of insecurity with Twitter as we are seeing in real time. Musk has already stated that he wants to reduce Twitter's infrastructure costs, he could decide that all content older than N years is being discarded, even more easily than he discarded half of Twitter's workforce.
On FB, I can go back 10 years and my content is still there. All of it. With the exception of a suspension, FB doesn't delete user content. Ever. The same applies to Twitter. Their track record of content persistence is excellent.
On Mastodon, media gets purged pretty much by policy. So you can be sure that you lose it all, thus rendering old toots useless. Add to this that every instance can disappear at any time, so besides your content, your account is also not safe.
What Musk could and could not decide is speculation. Track record looks back, not forward.
I don't believe any large service is more stable in the long term than a small one. To put it morbidly, all will be dust eventually. At least mastodon has account migration baked in.
Additionally, why would I want all my content to last forever? If I want something to last forever I'll carve it on a rock, not toot it.
Pretty much everything else you listed is a positive.
Large central services give reasonable stability as to not easily shut down altogether, having your account and all content removed. On Mastodon, this is a constant threat.
Perhaps that's for the best? Perhaps social media in the microblogging style should be considered ephemera.
Moderation and performance you're 100% dead on.
Look at all the complaints regarding onboarding. They are forced to pick a server and many directly stop at that, loudly complaining. Two days to wait for an activation email? Unacceptable.
As for content preservation, I get what you're saying. At the same time, I do believe that people are not used to the idea that their old media is purposefully deleted, automatically. Or that their toots and instance account can disappear at will. Those are new concepts and frictions when coming from a central platform.
To illustrate that point, Facebook has multiple giant data centers that host nothing but stale content. That pic you posted 7 years ago, it's over there. You will absolutely never ever look at it again, but in case you do...it's there. These massive investments underpin my idea that users expect their content to be persisted. If this wasn't important, Facebook would not do this.
I think the complexity of content preservation is that social media has various uses. You can chit-chat and use it as a casual conversation tool, yet others use it as a broadcast channel. Some may use it for record-keeping. Creators may build up a portfolio of rich media posts. Some people may be fine with the chit-chat deleted, but for many other uses it would be not acceptable at all.
What is guaranteed to keep existing in this world? certainly not the Internet....
That's an architectural problem with Mastodon, and can probably be fixed. But twitter has it solved by acting as a sort of well-established, large data bank; a place where you store your tweet data. Going to a Mastodon instance is like going to a tiny credit union, if credit unions weren't regulated in any way.
And to add insult to injury, better anti-harassment features are near impossible to implement because of the nature of federation. Other instances may run an older version, or simply chose to ignore your new rules.
If and when Mastodon grows to the size as becoming interesting for many mass scale harassment attacks, the only logical way out is to disable the federation part more and more. Which means you basically end up with tiny centralized bubbles. For which you could have simply created a subreddit or Discord, for free.
Moderation does scale poorly, which is why twitter is a shitshow and smaller forums (like this one) have a chance of being well moderated.
I wasn't commenting on the quality of moderation, instead on the scalability. Instance owners are easily overwhelmed and this problem gets worse as things grow.
Second, if your point is to create a tightly-moderated instance bubble, then Mastodon's federation features will largely go unused. If that is the outcome, then there's no point to Mastodon. You can recreate such spaces everywhere, for free.
Loss and death are part of life, they should be part of online life, too. Especially for things that are basically a glorified chat room.
And for the record, Mastodon content is stored on the Great Servers in the Cloud. Most instances run on AWS VPS.
> Imagine you're a rather small server and suddenly Eli Lilly and Company joins your instance. Today they have around 140K followers on Twitter and they are a publicly traded company. First of all with an account that large, every one of their posts will cause a lot of load on your infrastructure. Secondly though, they are a very interesting target to attack.
Why would Eli Lilly join some small instance? Why wouldn't they make their own instance? They have their own email and website after all. why be lilly@someoneelse.social when they could just be their own thing?
Because it's not worth the effort. If anything, there are going to a commercial providers that run servers for companies in a bundled way where all of their clients use their servers. But more likely, they won't bother at all with this, because it's not an important part of their business.
...aaaand we're back to Twitter in all but name
Finding is "where do I go to get X". We have URLs, which assume a specific server. There are content-based keys, such as DOIs and URIs and hashes. But how do you find where the info is stored? Google? Something like DNS? Something else? This is the hardest problem. What Youtube really sells is "discovery" not streaming hosting. There are lots of streaming services, but you won't get the views.
Identity has all the usual problems. If people can create lots of identities at low cost, there will be spam and worse. No good answers there. China has this fixed, but they don't do anonymity. You need a government ID to connect to anything.
Storage is the big cost problem. Where does all this stuff go, and who pays for it? IPFS was supposed to be the distributed answer to this, and Filecoin was supposed to be the way to pay for it. That didn't work out. On the other hand, if someone wants it out there, then maybe they have to pay to store one copy.
Delivery can be distributed, but do you want to? Bittorrent was the prototype. Peertube is another peer to peer way to do it. Each video has a home server, and large numbers of people watching the same thing won't overload it because anyone watching the video also serves it. It works OK but is not as smooth an experience as YouTube. Plus it runs down your battery and runs up your bandwidth usage. Bandwidth is much cheaper in data center bulk than out at the end of a cell connection. Maybe do something like that but with ISP level caching servers, all serving each other. Sort of like Cloudflare / Akamai.
> That didn't work out.
Can you expand on this point? At my end, IPFS runs along just fine: My IPFS instance in particular continues to serve its content without much fuss. For Filecoin, the content hosted there is still on the network, there's just much less speculative fervor surrounding it & other networks like it.
Privacy. Messages in a private chat or group should not be visible to the operator or others. This likely necessitates e2ee, but it's possible that some multi-party protocol could protect from malicious operators without going full on e2ee (difficult on web).
Integrity: you don't want rogue operators to be able to falsify content. While you can't stop any website from faking content, you can stop it from propagating by having signatures and verifying them.
Availability: you should be able to post and fetch at all times, which necessitates aggressive caching. Signatures (from above) are useful here, because you can use untrusted storage layers.
Security: how do you prevent an instance operator from stealing your account or posting on your behalf.
Abuse: no system is anywhere near perfect, but the ones that come close are extremely centralized and use fingerprinting and behavior analysis. We probably don't want that, so what else?
Note that all of these are deeply tied into the identity problem. We would really need a form of PKI for real people (but without exposing real world identity). If people actually control their private keys, all of the above is greatly simplified. But even in defi, where custody of your private keys have a HUGE direct monetary value, most people don't want/know/care to set it up. So we have huge challenges.
People should leave Twitter and start blogs so that they can talk about more complex things with more nuance
I know some of these types of groups, and I don't really publicize them, because the people who would fit in will find them, no need to grow to world-wide size.