As a regular fediverse user, the main detail I'd be curious about is: Which server was the experiment done on and which servers were federated with?
I don't have anything against this article per se, but it's worth noting every fediverse encounter is different.
My main take on this article is that it's like walking into a McDonald's and being upset they don't serve pizza and then condemning all fast-food as being terrible because it's not all pizza.
"We experienced the shutdown of our Mastodon instance twice. So, we migrated from securitymastod.one to mastodon.at, and then to chaos.social. Each time, we lost all of our posts, leaving behind a considerable number of dead links."
IMO organizations should self-host (same as with email, if you have a domain name that you are commonly associated with). If you aren't doing this, you don't fully understand the mechanics of the Fediverse or the underlying W3C ActivityPub protocols.
edit: by self-host, I mean either run your own infra or subcontract that out to a competent vendor. I don't literally mean self-host in the strictest sense.
Thanks for digging that up! Absolutely agreed about self-hosting and treating it like email. I've seen quite a few instances shut down in the ~6 months I've been around.
It's a pretty rough experience for people that are coming from the mainstream, since it's probably hard to imagine a social network powered by a rag-tag few people behind each instance and not multi-billion dollar tech behemoths.
Show me the Mastodon server with the moderation policy that fits the author's use case. It appears I can't even search mastodon instances by the criteria of moderation policy. (But if I'm missing something obvious please correct me because I'd love to be able to do this!)
There an abundant history of examples of centralized, publicly accessible forums where the quality of the discussion matches what the author desires. Plenty of FOSS mailing lists too, many of them extant. (On the topic of security, the cryptography list comes to mind.)
Mastodon's only value is in its utility to deliver discussions that are at least as functional as those I've participated in on these ancient services. If the author and I cannot easily (or ever) discover how to engage in discussions like that, it doesn't matter at all whether the underlying infrastructure is centralized or not.
I'm not fully sure what their use case is to speak to that. A good launching point to finding like minded people is this list though: https://fediverse.party/en/portal/servers
I joined before that link existed though, so I opted to join a really large instance, mastodon.social specifically in my case. From there, I started searching hashtags for topics I was interested in and engaging there. From my interactions, I got a feel of the quality of interactions from various instances. From there I started honing in on the various code of conducts to find a smaller instance I wanted to chill in.
It's worth noting that smaller, niche communities don't federate with the largest instances. If you're looking for the most down to earth people, it takes a few hops and a bit of time.
> I'm not fully sure what their use case is to speak to that.
The article spells it out-- they don't want drive-by, low-effort engagement with their posts.
> A good launching point to finding like minded people is this list though
Perhaps I'm idiosyncratic, but I don't see any value in choosing a server or community based on interest.
What I really care about is choosing a moderation policy, and viewing the content filtered through that lens. E.g., "Wholesome and non-contentious," or "thought-provoking and academic," etc.
Even then, I want to do that through a dropdown, not through a sign up on a server hard-coded to a single policy.
If that were true then email would be at odds with the concept of federation. There aren't interest-based email servers, or at least the concept of email isn't hard-coupled with interest-based servers.
I don't have anything against this article per se, but it's worth noting every fediverse encounter is different.
My main take on this article is that it's like walking into a McDonald's and being upset they don't serve pizza and then condemning all fast-food as being terrible because it's not all pizza.