Mastodon Sustainability – hosting costs, scaling concerns, and problem users
medium.com
medium.com
Back when IRC was new, open federation between IRC servers was the norm until bad actors forced the networks to only federate with known good actors, and to quarantine parts of the network that still allowed open federation - there is a reason why EFnet was called Eris Free. That was back in the 80's and early 90's. Today, attackers are far more sophisticated, and not even Twitter, who has $$$ to throw at the problem and owns the entire stack, is capable of stemming the tide of bad actors, spam, and fake accounts. Taking money seems like a good idea at first, but then suddenly you have to deal with credit card fraud.
I anticipate that Mastodon will balkanize, ending up with a couple of large networks, IRC-style, that federate only with each other, and have unified, agreed upon set of rules and a super-moderation team that can act on any node. Networks that insist on open federation will lose the battle against the tide of bad actors and will dissolve into anarchy and either shut down or start whitelisting with the rest of them.
I would really like to be convinced otherwise on open federation.
1 - There have been single programmers who built more effective block lists than twitter by doing the obvious thing: walking the graph of harassers and including common accounts;
2 - Twitter seem to be desperate to juice registration and active user accounts, and anything that hurts those is not a priority.