Comment by raydiatian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raydiatian | Hacker News Reader

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I mean what are the economics of fediverse? Who pays to keep the lights on, and where do they get their money from? How will the cost and logistics of policing one metric planet’s worth of sociopaths be any different from when Twitter had to do it?

I hate and am truly tired of America’s three premier Twitter narcissists (I bet I don’t even have to name them and you’ll know), but this “cry about Twitter and leave it” meme all feels like a groupthink knee jerk at its root, and then the “let’s move to fediverse” meme feels utterly thoughtless. Trolls are the internet, people turn to sociopaths the second they touch the net. It’s hyperbolic, but it’s not unfair. Trolls are on fediverse too, they cannot be escaped without several orders of magnitude additional energy injected into the system. If management alone and a desire to silence trolls is what this is all about, I’ve found that just being disconnected is an immense sea of peace, the one place they truly cannot get you. Social media is genuinely just a gigantic psy-op at this point anyway. Why even bother to participate and take it seriously?

> I mean what are the economics of fediverse? Who pays to keep the lights on, and where do they get their money from?

Is this a genuine question? Because it depends. Some people/groups run their own server. Others run free servers, kind of like people ran IRC servers. Some pool money together to run a server. Some are run by NGOs. One I saw was charging around $2 a month, but would use any profits to plant trees. I know it's not really polite to call out people for a lack of effort on HN, but all that information that I just gave to you, I got from browsing the server section of join mastodon or whatever it was called for like 5 seconds. It took you longer to wonder about this stuff, than it would've taken you to actually find out.

I don't want to come off as advertising mastodon or the fediverse. I just think the payment model is actually quite good and that there are more serious concern. Like what happens with your "twitter" handle if you've joined a server that goes rogue or shuts down. You can solve this by hosting your own mastodon server on your own domain or by joining a server run by some sort of established organisation, of which there seem to be very few. I like the concept personally, but I can also setup a self-hosted serve, or alternatively spin up a vps fairly easily, as can a lot of people here on HN. That's probably quite a barrier for most twitter users though.

> It took you longer to wonder about this stuff, than it would've taken you to actually find out.

It was a genuine question, because I didnt know the answer, but the effort it took to write all that out is because I’m trying to make a point. Additionally, it also didn’t require much effort to imagine theoretical models for how it, or any platform covers operating costs: Decentralized BYOServer, Ads, Subscriptions, User data markets.

I just don’t see it reaching scale without not grinding through people unnecessarily. And with the planet gently cooking itself stupid, I don’t understand how building YetAnotherSocialNetwork™ is a priority (which I know you aren’t advertising for).

I think we should all just let Elon run Twitter into the ground, and take it as the win it secretly is, and quit socializing on the internet (which I know will never happen).

I think the concept of it is kind of cool. The NYT or any other journalist institution could put up their own "twitter" and not rely on Elon not to ban them if they criticise him. Other people are setting up what is essentially their own YouTube, at least I found a French Blood Bowl 2 mastodont server that was full of match videos. I'm sure it'll be too much of a hassle, because you sort of need to put effort into it, and you don't on twitter/YouTube/discord/tiktok/whatevercomesnext. Especially in terms of actually turning your "views" into money, but the concept is pretty cool and very old "you own your own shit" internet.

Unlike a blog or something else you make on your own, it'll all be semi-connected though.

WRT the “uncensorability” of fediverse, the servers are all still built on top of (a) Amazon/Google/Microsoft IaaS or rolled at home. Those silicon chips and boxes are almost guaranteed to be produced and distributed by Apple/AMD/Intel/Qualcomm. They will pass around bytes on the internet policed by Comcast, Xfinity, Google, and Mediacom.

While it’s not impossible to pull off a coup against corporate owned social media, there are so many places where fediverse counts as parasitic competition that we basically need to have an open-source eternally-libertarian RISC-V shop at the scale of AMD to have a fighting chance of building a truly unbiased fediverse.

You're mainly talking about the problem of content moderation, and it's the sticky point for sure.

We know that content moderation cannot be done at scale. That why Facebook etc are such hellscapes; there is no algorithm in existence that a clever human won't figure out how to game.

Content moderation at human scales, however, is not as hard. I participated in many online forums which were run by one or a few moderators who policed the content with some auto filters for spam, and their own eyes. Some complained about the work, most just got it done and the forums worked fine, no big algorithms or star chamber councils to decide on what they do.

So, in answer to "why the fediverse," my answer is that if we break up the large platforms into a bunch of small forums under the control of only human moderators, there is every reason to believe that content moderation will become a great deal more possible and effective, and we will get our old internet back - the one based on protocols not platforms.

> So, in answer to "why the fediverse," my answer is that if we break up the large platforms into a bunch of small forums under the control of only human moderators, there is every reason to believe that content moderation will become a great deal more possible and effective, and we will get our old internet back - the one based on protocols not platforms.

Reddit 2.0

Nah, Reddit is still a platform. Yes, one that is intentionally divided into sections that feel like small communities, but still a monolithic platform just like all the rest. That's why I'm not there anymore.

Not really on ActivityPub either at the moment, I think I have an account on one of the big Mastadon servers but I'm kind of over that whole interaction model. Considering putting up a blog of some sort that federates, cause I do miss telling the whole internet my opinions on a certain level, and I think we do need that global connection web, on some level, to continue to exist. But the infrastructure can't belong to any individual man, or even be under any individual man's control. Or a few men. That's the biggest problem that needs to be solved first, in my opinion.

edit: I mean, even if we posit your Reddit comparison, wouldn't you agree that Reddit does a better job at moderation than Twitter or Facebook, and that that comes down to having more human moderators making moderation decisions? That seems like a fairly uncontroversial take, to me.

Already pointed out by others, but I think you might be underestimating just how much the issue comes from Twitter (et al.) being a platform : giant, centralized, closed, US-based...

The problem with social networks has never been the architecture. A walled garden never did anything wrong. It’s the sociopath that hangout inside the walled garden that make it a problem. If the sociopaths leave this one for another walled garden, this one becomes progressively more pleasant.

Hmm, well I guess that platforms would indeed be much less of a problem in a draconian antitrust system regularly shutting down the biggest ones (in a way forums are walled gardens with intrinsic limits to growth - the software on which they operate isn't closed though !), but in our world these aspect tend to strengthen each other...

Also, this is like with dictatorships : yes, you can get lucky with an enlightened despot, but even those don't last long, and it becomes difficult to deal with a too entrenched power once it turns ugly.

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