@clacke Nope! Never! equel.social gets a hard pass from me.
I'm against real name policies in socnets. I'm also against so-called job-hunting sites / #socnets that are not fit for their claimed purpose ( #LinkedIn / #LockedOut ).
#Medium link; don't be surprised if it does weird things before showing you the article.
"Mastodon brought a protocol to a product fight"
> Yes, yes, the network is under immense strain as people flee the Elon strain infecting Twitter. But come on, there are folks who really believe this is going to replace, or even stand alongside Twitter, as a massively scaled social network? I call bullshit. While it’s impressive that millions of users have apparently given Mastodon a try, the product is far too slapdash and clunky to keep folks engaged. A lump of coal.
No, it isn't meant to be a #Twitter replacement. Keep your Twitter account until you no longer want it--or the company closes and the site shuts down--you can use Mastodon alongside Twitter.
And the #Fediverse networks are much more than just #Mastodon. Don't think you have experienced the network and all it has to offer if all you've done is briefly tried to use Mastodon, because you haven't experienced it.
> I’ve somehow avoided signing up for the service up until now. Largely because signing up was and is so comically obtuse — pick your server everyone, hope you choose wisely!
Have you not used e-mail? It works the same way. You pick a server, such as Gmail or Outlook dot com, and sign up. Please tell me you realize that the people you communicate with are not all on the same e-mail service that you use.
> But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.
Okay, so how about this story: Twitter has only been profitable two or three years of its entire history. Since it started, it has existed by burning through investors' funds. Eventually, with or without Elon Musk's ownership, that runs out. Without such funding, their corporate-centralized ( #corpocentric ) model cannot exist very long. And same for their centralized competitors, such as Post.news, Gab, Parler, and so on. What is left is either #federated or #peer-to-peer approaches, where no single entity is responsible for funding and managing the entire network. So whether it is the #Fediverse ( with #ActivityPub and #OStatus and their successors ) & the Federation ( with #Diaspora ) or #Bluesky, or #Twister, or #NOSTR, the eventual future of #socnets is #decentralized, if not entirely peer-to-peer unless a national government takes over Facebook and Twitter in order to provide effectively unlimited resources. It is the protocol that makes it possible for thousands or millions of instances to displace and replace one big centralized instance.
One thing about this surge of people migrating from #Twitter to the #Fediverse is that people who gave up on #federated #socnets years ago and solely used #corpocentric platforms are now coming back.
Thus, I get announcements about people I knew from #Tent (thanks to fellow former Tentler @bthall) along with news about people from #Identi.ca and other #StatusNet and #Pump.io instances returning.
#ByteDance owned #TikTok tracks employees and journalists in unsuccessful attempt to find who leaked internal information. TikTok is under substantial pressure from federal and state agencies concerned that it gathers infromation for the Chinese government.
Here's a hint: if you make gathering any information above the minimum necessary to operate into a crime, both TikTok and all other #corpocentric #socnets will have to make major changes.
As an instructor taught us decades ago, "All information that you collect will eventually be stored. All information that you store will eventually be misused."
Libervia / Salut a Toi project is working on a protocol bridge, so that !xmpp based #socnets and #ActivityPub + #HTTP based social networks can interact.
To what @lxo posted, because vertical scaling ("bigger servers") has its limits, the big #corpocentric #socnets split things up and use technological workarounds to appear to be one big server.
For example, one of the first things is to move the #database management system ( #dbms ) to a separate machine. Once this happens, hoizontally scaling the database by clustering (multiple servers handling the same db) is possible.
Next, we can perform similar clustering with the web server, and we can perform similar clustering at the processing layers.
Once we do this, we can expose things through various interfaces. This is what #cloud providers do with their separate compute, database, and storage services. Each such service relies on hundreds of servers pretending to be one.
Finally, we come to #federation, where we skip the pretense that everything is one big server and instead have many separate individuals and organizations running servers.
It isn't inherently more complicated, but it does mean users have to know that we're not all on big-centralized-server.com.
It would be nice to have a big chunk of the people who are using #corpocentric #socnets like #Twitter and #Facebook and #Instagram move some or all of their presence over to the #OStatus and #ActivityPub branches of the #Fediverse, but I'd much rather they come because they want to try something different instead of coming because they are fleeing some change or impending change over there.
Why? Because these networks will never give them everything that those did. I personally believe that these networks can give some benefits that those cannot, but thus far, we've mostly tried to replicate their functionality ... without the benefit of nearly unlimited VC cash and a centralized model which puts $CentralizedNetwork at the center of its users' communications, where benefits built upon centralized knowledge of users' actions / choices / contacts.
Therefore, in 2-3 weeks, I expect 9 out of 10 new users to have have returned to Twitter ... or to some centralized network that springs up to duplicate Twitter without the Musk factor.
This has happened before. Maybe not on this scale, but it has happened. Multiple times. And always, most of them leave.
I know that Gargron was invited to participate and even paid some amount of EURO, but I recall he said he did not integrate #Eunomia into #Mastodon.
My impression is that there were some API hooks that could be used for their "social credit" system, and that those may have been enhanced. However, that is just my impression and not documented fact.
I also get the impression that Eunomia is not just about the #Fediverse--they would like to eventually hook into #corpocentric #socnets also--and that Fediverse-related activities pretty much stalled out years ago.
It is irritating that so many #socnets think they have to be entirely depending on #JavaScript. Mastodon and #Pleroma both require #JabbaShit before they display anything or have even basic functionality.
@vegos I agree. To most organizations, their primary concern is reach. So they congregate on big #corpocentric #socnets, even when the central corporation running things is actively hostile to their point of view.
Then they're butthurt when their accounts are shadowbanned.
Years ago, I tried to persuade some local Black churches and ethic-focused organizations to join !GNUsocial and #Diaspora, but was unsuccessful. I think they all joined #Facebook, where their posts are hidden by the algorithms.
@moonman You're better off just getting the equivalent of a DO droplet (but don't use an account you already have) and hosting a separate instance. Whomever pulled the strings to make all the #corpocentric #socnets drop them at once could easily do the same with your dedi-hosting provider.