The Many Branches of the Fediverse

I think you are misinterpreting what the parent comment is suggesting. You for sure can’t host a Mastodon server off of a mobile device. I think they were suggesting ‘how hard would it be’ to make a mobile app that would allow anyone to spin up their own Mastodon instance in the cloud.

I’m not sure I know the answer to that question. It’s definitely not a trivial problem to solve, but also not so crazy that it couldn’t be solved with some concerned effort. There are already some 3rd party services that will host your Mastodon for you, but as far as an easy to use mobile app, could be a good business opportunity for anyone with the right motivation.

> your server needs to be online and ready to accept effectively a webhook from them.

The obvious answer there is "ActivityPub over SMTP". There is literally nothing that could go wrong![1]

(Basically a service which holds "ActivityPub postboxes" which collect events when you're offline and you pick them up in a batch when you're back online. The XMPP people already solved this one, IIRC.)

[1] Ok, there might be -some- problems.

That’s not what they were saying. Of course, your Mastodon instance need to be hosted on some remote Linux server in the cloud. But imagine you could use a mobile app, that provides the service of handling said instance, & exposes the front end client in the same mobile app? It’s totally feasible.

It's a bit technical to set up. Maybe sell rpis that are already set up to host? Plug n play somehow

Where can you buy a pi for $40?

> Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them.

Necessary in what sense? It's a bit like saying mosquitoes were necessary to create.

They continue to exist because they are good at perpetuating their own existence.

Basically the way it works is most of the servers are run by people from marginalized communities. They don't like it when people call them slurs, so they ban slur-sayers from their own servers and block the servers that won't. When a new instance with slur-sayers pops up, the mods who care notice because they start seeing lots of reported posts, so they check if the new instance has responsive mods and rules against saying slurs and if it doesn't they block the instance. Then they usually make a #fediblock post about it including the domain of the instance and what it was blocked for, and people who appreciate moderation boost the post so the mods for more instances will see it.

Of course it's not just saying slurs that instances get blocked for, but that and spam are the most common things new instances get blocked for. There are a few other common things that instances are blocked for, but since the people doing those things aren't trying to bypass blocks so they can harrass people they don't feel the need to make new instances all the time.

You don’t need to read every post which is posted on instances, similarly to twitter. You don’t read every post on twitter, but instead follow people, read their tweets and retweets and build a graph which suits your likings.

You can do the same on the fediverse and create your own homogeneous feed.

Yes, the shitheads will go where they are tolerated. So do people who aren't necessarily bad people but still want to share opinions which may be outside what is currently the orthodox way of thinking. If that alone makes someone a shithead to you…

But if you really don't want to see arguments about Jews or whatever, just don't follow anyone who posts that. And if someone you follow does start with that stuff, just unfollow them, perhaps block them. In that manner it works the same way as on Twitter; once you have a solid base of sane people you're following, it's hard to just stumble across content that upsets you unless you're actively looking for it.

I hang out on the free speech side, and I mostly avoid the JQ and edgelord types. It's not hard, you curate your own feed, and the block button is merely a click away. You run into them in threads and just ignore them, just like in real life (and up until like 6 years ago, on the internet in general).

points on PC culture aside, it really bothers me to have slurs thrown out in HN comments to prove said points. i'm not usually offended by stuff, but i want this community to be held to a higher standard re: discourse

Yes the irony of r/conservatives one of the most ban happy reddits, where the posters all vehemently promote how pro freespeech they are.

I spent months starting arguments daily on Parler and Gab by convincingly playing the character of a pansexual Soros funded double vaxxed, anti-2A, pro-abortion, climate science worshiping socialist and never got shadow banned, canceled, kicked, or warned in any way.

So in my experience they very much did NOT become safe spaces, even when faced with every idea I could think of which could be considered solidly "left."

I host my own Mastodon instance and my policy is to generally not block people. I've been blocked by more 'free speech' instances than I can count after responding to their arguments with a left-wing perspective. Yet they complain loudly about being blocked by 'progressive safe spaces'.

They also tend to speak favorably about certain U.S. Republicans whom they say are pro free-speech and when you point out they are pro banning (BDS as an example), you either get instantly blocked or they suddenly 'are tired of this conversation and no longer wish to engage'.

Oh the irony.

As I understand it, in the fediverse the divide literally exists in the network topology. Members of Group A share an address space with members of Group B, but the structure of the fediverse prevents them from sending messages to each other.

This is interesting to talk about because it's a pretty unique situation. Other decentralized systems have converged on a single globally connected network everyone uses; either everyone can visit your website or your website is irrelevant. (You're either allowed on Twitter or banned from Twitter.) Individual blocks exist but they aren't widespread enough to break the whole network into pieces.

The closest comparison I can think of is when Russia disconnected itself from the Internet. Everyone was still nominally part of "the Internet", they all still used globally unique domain names and IP addresses and stuff, but suddenly Russians could only access Russian websites and non-Russians could only access non-Russian websites.

Claude Lévi-Strauss visited an Indian tribe and asked them to draw a map of their village. Everybody draw the huts as a ring. But the ring was drawn in two incompatible ways. Some emphasized a central gathering place in the middle of the village in their drawing, and drew the huts around that, some closer, some further away. Others drew a clear line between the village: the people on one side, and others on the other side.

This is essential to how people conceptualize disagreement. At the root of the disagreement is something sacred, something taboo, which cannot be openly discussed. Some people consider others to be closer or further from the taboo. Other people think that there is a line that divides incompatible views about the taboo.

The immediate reaction to this description is very likely to be a misunderstanding if you think about it in the context of an actual divide. Nobody is above the taboo, including you, although everybody thinks they are above the taboo. You cannot escape it with "logical thinking", because both sides conceptualize the taboo in incompatible ways. The logical thinking happens within this conceptualization. The immediate reaction is to blame one of the sides of the discussion of misunderstanding.

This was a very interesting read and I think in very good analysis of the concept.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the points are all pretty mundane: computers exist in a human world bound by human conventions. After all, computers are made by and for humans to serve human needs, and they are subservient to the rules of human society, whether or not those rules can be digitally encoded in an absolute sense.

Like much of law, intent matters and intent can’t be read from a series of bytes, but is instead often determined by a human, outside the digital realm. If our laws didn’t consider intent it would be less of an issue.

I find none of that surprising. Though perhaps that means it wasn’t written for me.

I know what you meant, my point was that the non federating internet has the same thing and it doesn't stop people from using it.

I'd say you do the same thing you'd do on the big tech internet: you open a YouTube account if you want to make videos, so have a peertube account. You have a twitter account for microblogging, so have a mastodon/pleroma/misskey account. You'd have an Instagram account if you want to primarily share photos, so open a pixelfed account. Open 3. Share your accounts on the others. this is not a new problem, we already do this on twitter, Instagram, reddit, etc.

I may not be parsing you correctly, but in what sense do you mean consensus? I think Mastodon simply relies on there being a single authoritative source of material from any address, and then that goes out to various places local and remote depending on details.

I'm not sure that's really consensus so much as message delivery, I don't think anyone would notice if posts arrived out of order (for instance). It strikes me as well enough served by a database that gets updates from users on an instance.

So I guess, admittedly I may well not understand, but what does consensus have to do with it?

Most instances post active user counts, so theoretically we could have a bot that scraps all of those and adds them up. Can't find one, unfortunately.

Yeah, I guess they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it. Everyone was there for the warez and probably pr0n in many cases. But the communities were really great. But it took Facebook to figure out how to centralize that.

That’s awesome! I did a quick search and it doesn’t seem like tracker-tracker is around anymore.

What do people do there? Just old communities of people chatting, etc? Warez and mp3 were always a big draw back then but probably not relevant today.

And yeah with websockets you could make a web client!