Chris Trottier
It's hilarious that even in comments to the above ⬆️post⬆️, people insist that quote boosting doesn't exist on the Fediverse.
So here's a link to me quote boosting:
https://vancity.social/notes/9964hvv2a2
And here's a screenshot of me quote boosting.
Aral Balkan
@atomicpoet @mikka And we can argue whether it should be driving the social media for Fortune 500 companies or be as big as it is (and continuing to grow) but that’s for another time :)
Chris Trottier
@mikka Mastodon has to pay other developers and perhaps moderators—Eugen doesn't make all the money.
But either case, 32K/month is a pittance for an organization that's now driving the social media for Fortune 500 companies.
Hoppmester Fønvind Snublebluss
@atomicpoet I'd contest that statement.
The Mastodon gGmbH makes 32k from Patreon. It also has a number of other income/revenue streams. There is NLnet with two sponsorships, and 42 organizations and groups also supporting Mastodon. Among them questionable financiers such as a number of Casino sites.
Germany has a very strict rule on "Offenlegung" meaning German gGmbH have to publish their earnings and spendings publicly at the end of a business year. So far, the Mastodon gGmbH has not done this, but I'd assume they passed the 20k/year that mandate this.
It'll be interesting to see how much money they make from the 4+ Casino Sites.
Chris Trottier
But if you really want quote boosts in vanilla Mastodon—have you ever thought about paying @Gargron to implement that feature?
The man makes $36,000/year.
If you threw $5,000 at him, maybe he'd consider getting it done.
Chris Trottier
Also, to people demanding features:
It's important to remember that, generally speaking, you're not customers on the Fediverse.
Don't be asking to speak to the Fediverse manager.
The people building this software are (mostly) volunteers. So please be kind.
Chris Trottier
Here's another difference between Twitter and the Fediverse:
You want a feature and Twitter doesn't have it? Tough luck—Twitter devs will tell you to shove it!
You want a feature and Mastodon doesn't have it? Maybe Friendica has it instead.
Example: Groups. You're never going to get Groups on Twitter. But you have them on the Fediverse!
Chris Trottier
"Mastodon *should* have quote boosting!"
But it doesn't. So what are you going to do about it?
Use Mastodon and not quote boost? Or use another service that does?
From my standpoint, this is an easy problem to solve.
Chris Trottier
Also, the reason "Mastodon" is *not* a synonym for the Fediverse is precisely because other services can do things that Mastodon can't.
You absolutely need quote boosting?
Then don't use Mastodon.
Instead, use Calckey, Akkoma, Friendica—a host of services that aren't Mastodon.
Aral Balkan
@atomicpoet ;)
Chris Trottier
@aral @mikka Sure, I'll answer that question: Mastodon shouldn't be driving the social media for Fortune 500 companies.
Aral Balkan
@atomicpoet @mikka Be careful what you ask for… it will happen, of course, the eventual corporate capture of the fediverse is inevitable due to its architecture, but we can at least not hope for it to happen as quickly as possible. The quicker we move through by the embrace stage, the quicker we get to extinguish. And I, at least, would like to have the Small Web up and running as a refuge before that happens :)
Chris Trottier
@aral @mikka I mean, somebody should probably be making Enterprise-grade Fediverse software.
And whoever that is could probably be charging money for support, customizations, account management, hosting, etc.
I've thought about this possibility for years, and now it's actually not just feasible, but a critical need.
Aral Balkan
@atomicpoet No argument from me there. The last thing we should be doing is supporting corporations with donations from individuals – a corporate tax, if you will – which is what’s happening on certain instances now.
Chris Trottier
@aral @mikka Corporate capture is already happening. What I hope we do is de-centralize further—keep the infrastructure from focusing on any one thing.
Right now, these corporate folks are focusing on Mastodon.
What would be much better is if they *stopped* joining volunteer-run instances and actually ran their own instances instead. One that actually compensates people for actual work they do—instead of exploiting "free".
Aral Balkan
@Palky55 VC: Venture Capital(ists)
David Palk #FBPE #RejoinEU
@atomicpoet @mikka @aral Co-ops I understand and support. VC's ? Virtual Communities?
Chris Trottier
@Palky55 @mikka It's as @aral says. Because of how the Fediverse is engineered, you can't avoid it.
People already use the Fediverse for work. What are we going to do? Chase out the journalists, CTOs, creatives, etc.?
What we can do is think about alternatives monetization strategies that don't involve VCs.
For example, why not co-ops?
David Palk #FBPE #RejoinEU
@atomicpoet @aral @mikka I hope I'm not missing the point here but wouldn't moneytising and concretising the #fediverse be at odds with what we love about it?
Chris Trottier
@aral @mikka Hell, let's go further. Somebody could be building an entire business just on archiving Fediverse posts.
Why? Because the legal system demands it.
Aral Balkan
@atomicpoet @mikka I can’t do end-to-end encrypted messaging using Gemini so I can’t model the whole person, only our public parts (and a subset of those). Also, I’m trying to build a bridge (from what exists to a peer-to-peer future). I need to use existing infrastructure to do that. “Step 1: Install a Gemini client” is too high a barrier of entry for my needs. So while I’m very happy Gemini exists (the more alternatives, merrier) it doesn’t solve the problem I’m trying to solve.
Chris Trottier
Aral Balkan
@mikka I remember when Matt forked b2 (I was using it for my site). Ah, the good old days :)
Hoppmester Fønvind Snublebluss
In 1997 I was the sole remaining active developer of INN 2.0. Millions of users used the Usenet. I did it as my "main job" and made 12k/year (ISC grant). The heavy lifting, installing the software, and many patches, came from the community.
Postfix, qMail, Postgres, Caddy, a good deal of software that drives the Internet, is run by volunteer enthusiasts who do an outstanding job. Heck, Linux didn't feed Linus until 1996 when he joined Transmeta.
More, when Postgres had the install width of Mastodon today, it was "sponsored" by Michael Stonebraker. Later DARPA and the Army paid a good deal of the development costs, but that was when the project had 800k lines of C code and a development team had to be hired to maintain it.
Another one: Redis was, for years, an enthusiast product. Its success came from an Open Governance model in which no BDFL made all the decisions and did all the work. Later, Redis Inc. was founded and started to pay two developers a part time salary. Still, there are few systems out there that are. not using it.
When Matt took WordPress to the next level and "hired" me, he was working at CNet and I was working at Technorati (and later Socialtext). We made no money from the whole thing until much later (I'd left by then to go into medicine).
Mastodon is not that huge a project. It has the potential to be. It can be easily supported by a governance system and volunteer coders. Much bigger systems were.
Aral Balkan
@mikka The issue with Tumblr coming to the fediverse is, one day to the next, it will become – as a corporate entity – the largest instance by orders of magnitude. That’s a huge shift in the power dynamics of the fediverse. There’s nothing we can do to resist that on a technical level but I do feel we must consider doing so on a social level unless we’re content with the driving force behind the fediverse shifting from a not-for-profit entity to a for-profit corporate one overnight.
Hoppmester Fønvind Snublebluss
See the last paragraph on this post: https://medic.cafe/@mikka/109463627975781773
Aral Balkan
@atomicpoet And yet, longer term, we can also do much better than hoping and praying that our landlords are benevolent. We can build a system without landlords. One where we own, instead of rent our places.
Chris Trottier
@kcsorenby @aral @mikka I mean, last week I mentioned that three very large instances are run by a VC group.
The way to resist this is to ensure that whoever runs your instance is in sync with your values. Namely, that they won't sell out 😉
Karin Sorenby
@aral @atomicpoet @mikka to even think that it will eventually happen is not a happy thought at all..😣…
Aral Balkan
@mikka The assumption being that those corporate entities will not attempt to embrace, extend, and extinguish. That we won’t have a repeat of what happened with RSS or XMPP.
And, again, all those things will happen again because the design of the fediverse/ActivityPub/Mastodon is built on Big Tech/Big Web patterns and thereby inherits its scaling characteristics and (while philosophically it may be opposed to them) its success criteria too.
David Palk #FBPE #RejoinEU
@atomicpoet @mikka @aral Aaagh. Sends shivers up my spine. Tangentially I had noticed a few super ego's and narcissists enchroaching bringing their #twitter flocks, aka #groupies with them. At the moment I can avoid even having to read their regurgitated bollox but for how long? If you're familiar with the scenario, how do we repel the #Borg even if we wanted to?
Hoppmester Fønvind Snublebluss
I don't view the Fediverse as the next Twitter. To me it's an OOB content delivery network based on HTTP. That means I view it the same way as I view VC companies installing Apache/nginx/Caddy or a mail server. I don't care.
Let them set up their websites, or email servers, I don't communicate with them or visit their sites.
So let them come. Let MANY fediverse enabled software solutions come. Let gambling and sex (Eugen's sponsors after all) become ActivityPub enabled. Let Fox News have an AP feed. Let the Republican Party have one. Let everyone become Fediverse enabled. And then subscribe to the content YOU want.
Chris Trottier
@Palky55 @mikka @aral VCs = venture capitalists.
I hope the Fediverse can resist their influence because I already see them present here.
Aral Balkan
@mikka …I’m not saying we can avoid this. I’m saying we should attempt to stave it off for as long as we can so that the fediverse can continue to act as a stopgap at least until systems not built on these underlying patterns and without the same scaling characteristics and inherited success criteria can offer a longer-term alternative.
(So maybe that we can try to apply social pressure to slow it down. Or at the very least not embrace and legitimise it to speed it up.)
Aral Balkan
@mikka Yeah, we see things differently (which is fine). I want to see a non-corporate web where personhood is protected by default and people, not corporations, have primacy. That’s necessarily a very opinionated position. In my view, we can’t all just get along because we are not all equal. The power differential between me (a person) and a trillion-dollar corporation is nonsensical. As I see it, we must do everything we can to remedy that and protect the former from the latter.
Hoppmester Fønvind Snublebluss
And, see, I don't see it that way. I see Mastodon as a (shitty) implementation of a federation protocol that should, ideally, link ALL the content on the Internet.
You can sit on your Mastodon instance and experience Twitter 2.0. Or you can subscribe to content outside the instance and experience Content 2.0.
For this, more content has to become Fediverse enabled. I'd love for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok to become Fediverse enabled. I would not have to have an account there to follow and interact with my friends there. Or better, to consume their content and interact with it.
Fediverse is a subscription/publication protocol. Mastodon uses this to provide a much limited service that emulates Twitter's functionality. I would really like it, if Mastodon servers were one of the things I can subscribe to, but by far not the majority.
Aral Balkan
@mikka Indeed. And my qualms about Mastodon’s unwillingness to decentre itself are no secret :)
Hoppmester Fønvind Snublebluss
But isn't that what Mastodon is doing right now to AP and its use? How about this: try federating your blog's formatted and media-enriched Article ContentType. See what your Mastodon subscribers say.
T L Holaday
@aral @atomicpoet @mikka What makes downloading an app a particularly high barrier? Hundreds of millions of people have successfully “installed clients” for TikTok.
Aral Balkan
@tlholaday And the moment we have TikTok’s marketing budget so folks know to download it, we’ll be all set ;)
I‘m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying that when trying to get people to adopt something new, try to reduce rites of passage and make it as easy as possible to get up and running.
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