I thought that the massive usability cost and governance complexity of a federated social network wasn't worth it… until a narcissist billionaire bought my favourite online hangout on a whim, and now the costs of federation are looking pretty good to me!
@simonw
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Trust Breach: Reconsidering AI Ethics and Corporate Accountability
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A week ago I would have agreed with you, but this feels different now: for me the trust thermocline here has been well and truly broken
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Federation Exceeds Expectations Despite Usability Challenges
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I think one reason I'm so impressed is that I understand how much of a negative impact federation has on usability (a reason I didn't think it would work and never signed up before) and as a result it's wildly exceeding my low expectations
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Six Years of AI Adoption Creating Seamless User Experience
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As a total newcomer I've been amazed at how smooth the whole experience has been – it's clearly had six years of early adopters figuring out and solving as many of the rough patches as possible!
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Mastodon App Sees User Return and Significant Improvements
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Genuinely the first time I've heard of that app Lots of people who tried out Mastodon a few years ago have been signing up again (or reactivating old accounts) and expressing surprise at how much it has improved since they first tried it
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Twitter’s Free Model Deteriorates Content Quality and Communities
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Right now using Twitter for free has already changed, because the only thing people talk about on here is the state of Twitter! The product may stay free but the content and communities I care about are already deteriorating rapidly here
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Twitter’s $8 subscription changes social media economics
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My hunch is that something pretty seismic has changed in the past few days Mastodon used to have to compete with Twitter – a free, ad-supported service. Why pay for Mastodon if Twitter is free? Twitter seems to be setting a new expectation that $8/month is a fair price to pay!
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Thousand tiny servers bloom: Mastodon financial sustainability model
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That's another reason why I'm optimistic: may a thousand tiny servers bloom Mastodon users seem to get that they should open their wallets – there are no ads so it's pretty clear that people need to help financially support the servers they are using – or volunteer time, or both
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AI System Scaling Challenges: Preparing for 100x Growth
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I'm cautiously optimistic, mainly because the people who've been growing it for the past six years seem to have thought very hard about these topics and invested a huge amount of work in them But I agree that it's v. uncertain how it will cope with growing 100x in a few weeks!
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Decentralized Moderation: Distributed Responsibility Across Thousands
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I really do think that's one of its strengths though: there are genuinely thousands of servers, so the moderation responsibility is shared by a very wide set of volunteers