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Comment by dethos | Hacker News Reader

Started using just out of curiosity, about it being a federated system (just like email), I also knew about the interoperability with Gnu Social and OStatus networks, so I gave it a shot.

I launched my private instance and started from there. I can say I'm very surprised, the system works very well, never had major problems and the communication with people with accounts on other instances (since I'm the only one in mine) works flawlessly.

This is how the Internet was supposed to work (not full of walled gardens). The good thing is that we're seeing some great decentralized applications and tools appearing recently and a renewed interest in this area, which is great.

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> This is how the Internet was supposed to work (not full of walled gardens). The good thing is that we're seeing some great decentralized applications and tools appearing recently and a renewed interest in this area, which is great.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, lumped under my own umbrella term of "communal computing". Instead of one large instance, many smaller instances hosted by independent administrators and often targeted toward particular communities. Avoiding the scaling issues of the former type of service by shrinking things down to where individual operators can run them. Examples include Mastodon, shell services like tilde.town or sdf.org, old-school MUDs, chat servers.

> Avoiding the scaling issues of the former type of service by shrinking things down to where individual operators can run them.

As an aside, this will happen on all businesses too, not just web sites. As software, services, and robotics get better we will start to see solo operated versions of every business.

Once we start dropping the average corporation size below 1 (each person runs multiple businesses) most of capitalism’s ill effects will be blunted.

I don't know. I think that it will be a long time until the benefits of working in regular cooperation with others will disappear.

What is it about Twitter that takes 3000 people to keep going vs something like Mastodon? Is Mastodon missing something major that Twitter has? Is it just about scale?

Sales, support, marketing, accounting, business ops, software ops, management, HR. Pare those off and you might get something like Mastodon's contributor size after adjusting for scale of user base. Although I doubt many of Mastodon's contributors are full time, so a comparison is difficult.

So Twitter is big because it's big?

I don’t follow. Twitter is big because of all the things I just listed.

You just listed its components, the question was about why Twitter needs those things but Mastodon does not.

Because Twitter is a for-profit business, whereas Mastodon is not.

And they are up to around $2 billion in losses so far, right?

It sounds like they would be better off just being a Mastodon node.

Twitter has to do everything itself - sales, marketing, customer support. This means that its vision is limited by what the executives can see, and they're going to look at traditional business factors for ideas. The political structure tends toward corporate fiefdoms over time.

Mastodon is leveraging forces from many different directions: first by building towards the existing GNUSocial protocol and its userbase, and then as different communities come in, getting donations of their time and skills to operate instances tailored to their needs. Businesses have angles on this too: for example Japanese art site pixiv made their own instance and client app. The federated model allows some divergence but also the "loose ties" of a common protocol. There is the prospect of embrace-extend-extinguish occurring, but this historically only happens some of the time, and it requires the full pressure of a giant tech firm and all their marketing strength to make it work.

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