Mastodon's federation model encourages specific instances with peculiar rules
but-her-flies.bearblog.dev
but-her-flies.bearblog.dev
I'm one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for. There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues. I migrated to topic-based sites as a result.
It seems like mastodon is essentially forcing you to choose a subreddit that will be your governing community, then that becomes your identity. It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account. (I don’t have a mastodon account, this is my impression of what the article says).
Maybe not by technical design, but subreddit moderators ban people for merely being subscribed to other subs all the time. I once got banned from participating in r/antiwork because I was subscribed to r/wallstreetsilver. That's not the only time, but that's probably the most stupid example. No, I didn't break any rules.
If you comment in r/conservative, even as someone who isn't subscribed and just happened to end up on the post due to r/all or a crosspost, odds are you'll get hit with a number of bans on other subreddits.
This is for the same reason that mastodon's federation works the way it does: those other groups do not want to associate with or interact with accounts that talk on or interact with these certain communities.
If you interact with a toxic subreddit that has a habit for harassing other communities, those other subreddits likely will ban you just to save themself the trouble of dealing with someone who might bring them more stress or hassle.
Likewise if you federate with a toxic instance or are hosted by a toxic instance, other instances will block yours and you'll be cut off.
The only extension to this is that your instance can do the same to others. But that's really not that massive of a concern as you can pretty easily just move to a new instance or better yet, host your own instance and not have to worry with it at all.
You're talking about signing up on a toxic instance, and thus getting banned from other instances.
The blog post is talking about signing up on an instance with strict rules, and those rules applying to posts you make no matter what instance the post is on, which makes it impossible to express yourself the way you want anywhere. Note that this doesn't involve toxic instances at all.
The instance provides the resources you consume to access Mastodon. In exchange you follow their rules.
If you don't like their rules you can move to someone else's instance or even host your own. The process seems pretty simple: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...
I don't object in principle to instance admins having a lot of power, precisely because they provide the resources and you can move to some other instance whenever you want. That seems reasonable.
There's also nothing preventing you from having multiple Mastodon accounts on multiple instances, including one where you're a responsible member of society and another where you're tooting spicy politics under a pseudonym all day (and the network opts in or out of you as it prefers).
This isn't a solution to "this" because this problem doesn't exist on reddit.
You don't get banned from reddit because any single subreddit didn't like what you wrote. Subreddit mods can't ban you from other communities. Admin of the instance you sign up with on Mastodon can.
Mastodon puts the banhammer of the network admins into hands of many, many people who run instances, aren't bound by any rules, and can read your direct messages.
>I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of thing becomes the norm on Mastodon as well. I realize that the analogy isn’t perfect because most Reddit accounts are anonymous, whereas a much larger number of Twitter/Mastodon accounts aren’t.
Well that was one issue highlighted in the article linked.
Go figure, there's a place for having an online social network where people can authentically express themselves.
In Mastodon, you can only express yourself to the extent that it complies with the views of the admin of the instance you are with.
We are talking about getting banned from the instance you are federating with.
You can't get booted off of reddit for violating rules specific to a subreddit.
But with Mastodon, the initial choice of instance to join determines all future Mastodon behavior.
But I agree with the model Mastodon is building out over the model of centralization that Twitter had. I think Twitter encouraged too much topic-free shouting into the void, which decreased the utility of discourse in general.
It's also really unclear to me where the OP is getting the sense that Mastodon instances are so heavily topic-oriented. I haven't observed any stories of Mastodon admins blocking users for being off-topic; the flavor of sites seems to be more about shared interests in the sense of old IRC communities than in the sense of topicality like a subreddit.
I myself was banned from a small instance over a misunderstanding without prior notice (since english isn't my native language). This was my only account on mastodon, so I lost all my contacts.
The admin had contact info on the instance, but I didn't have the motivation to be in mastodon anymore.
EDIT: I'd like to add. I don't really see mastodon as a social network.. if we're comparing it to something, it's more like a simple messaging group.
If by being open and liberal (in the non-political sense) one risks being banned then essentially it's punishment (or the threat of punishment) for defection and the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors. The suggestion to then "host your own instance" looks a lot like "build your own X" that we had prior to Musk's take over of Twitter from people who didn't really care about the problem (or even see it as a problem). Do you really think people will start hosting their own instances for this?
I don't know precisely where people ever got the idea that the kernel of the nature of the Internet was ever anything other than "Admins rule the system."
It has always been the nature of the machine that you either operate as a guest of someone else's system or you own a system (and maintain the social etiquette / business agreements necessary to stay peered to other systems, as well as fight the perpetual fight against those who would use your tool to do harm).
From e-mail to USENET to IRC to web sites to social media platforms, the social aspect of the network itself is and always has been inextricable from its function. it's a network built by, for, and of people. Mostly volunteers. Mostly volunteers who do it for the love of the geekery of making sand think and lightning dance in a bottle, of building a thing that lets people in Akron talk to people in Anchorage, stepping back, and going "Wow, it's neat that that's possible."
I agree with you that it's a tall ask to tell people "If you really want to participate as a peer, you need to technically be a peer," but I have never seen another alternative floated that had any chance of success whatsoever. You cannot force people to talk to each other. You cannot force system operators to allow traffic through private systems that they don't choose to allow through. If you try, they'll leave, and you'll get a network governed by government instead of volunteers (which we can see plenty of examples of already, and they're more restrictive than what we have now).
The 'Net also interprets lack of censorship as damage and routes around it. Always has.
Except there's a whole lot of the Fediverse that doesn't work by this "free speech is fascism that must be banned" principle. You can even find huge lists of such nodes in the huge blacklists maintained by this loose community.... And it's quite refreshing to communicate without worrying about every word you say.
It's an outside of the Fediverse problem which therefore cannot escape it, but with solutions that work both outside and inside it.
If you end up participating in subreddits that discuss political topics the mods of subreddit A will ban you for even participating in subreddit B. Or the mods or some other user on the subreddit will report you after trawling through your post history.
Now I am not fully against this. If you find a user in you subreddit who has a habit of posting opinions on some other subreddit that go on the lines of "Women should not be allowed to work and are only mean to make kids" they probably are functioning on a very different set of axioms and will probably make your space worse with their participation.
But things can get petty pretty quickly.
So you essentially end up maintaining different alts for different topics or subreddits.
I’ve been on Reddit for 10 years and I’ve only experienced this… once? Twice at the most. It happened so long ago I can’t even remember the specifics.
I’m not against it either, in theory, but I wouldn’t say it’s a defining feature of Reddit or even a common occurrence the way it is for Mastodon.
I just assumed it was a tribute to Lemmy Caution[0]. And Lemmy Caution is one cool dude.
Right now you can emulate this by putting your other instance links in your bio. I do think there should be a dedicated "linked instances" section which is more coordinated (only lets you link when you can access both accounts, and updates every other instance when you add a new one).
I hope they add this feature soon enough. The nice thing is that anyone can add this feature, and if the devs approve it, most active instances will likely update. I won't be the one to though :)
It's that but expanded to where servers can also communicate with other servers, so the general expectation is that you follow the server rules and other servers can assume the rules tell you how that server will behave in aggregate.
It's a feature not a bug because it allows you to identify servers that might not fit with your group and weed out individuals that cause problems across multiple servers.
> It's a feature not a bug because it allows you to identify servers that might not fit with your group and weed out individuals that cause problems across multiple servers.
That's exactly the bug. Imagine if one IRC network blacklisted you just because you chatted on another IRC network.
> That's exactly the bug. Imagine if one IRC network blacklisted you just because you chatted on another IRC network.
This is exactly what IRC networks did. They maintained a blacklist of hosts that were compromised in case of spyware, or if users were particularly prolific and abusive across networks. Mastodon just makes that explicit.
Some IRC networks do, but it's always an ad-hoc extension. IRC qua IRC doesn't.
> there were many umbrella servers that would be used for various communities to call home in a proto-Discord world.
Did those have channels that passed blacklists around and would ban you on other channels' say-so, or because you were in channels they didn't like? I'm sure there were some channels that did, but it certainly wasn't seen as a positive.
> They maintained a blacklist of hosts that were compromised in case of spyware, or if users were particularly prolific and abusive across networks.
That's not the same thing at all. I'm talking about getting banned on one server just because you joined another server.
Sure, hence why I used the word 'Evolved'. Not all IRC networks did , but it became common place. I'm not sure what your point is here unless you're arguing Mastodon should just toss away the evolution of discussion.
> Did those have channels that passed blacklists around and would ban you on other channels' say-so, or because you were in channels they didn't like? I'm sure there were some channels that did, but it certainly wasn't seen as a positive
Yes? That was the job of the server admin? It's like you weren't around when IRC servers were starting pissing contests between the two. The freenode drama wasn't even very long ago but this kind of stuff goes way back.
> That's not the same thing at all. I'm talking about getting banned on one server just because you joined another server.
See above. I've been in plenty of IRC drama where prominent users were told to go back to servers or kicked off.
You know that you can follow who you want on Twitter, right? You made it political for yourself by following people that talk politics
2) the problem is precisely that I do not want to know what my very topic oriented follow is doing in terms of political tweeting. I’m sure this is a hard problem to solve, and I don’t want someone to be non-political for the sake of their follows. In most instances, I 100% agree with their views without reservation even. I just don’t want to see it on twitter. I would like to see any non political, topic oriented content they like and retweet however.
Further, the communities on Twitter that aren't part of this are largely segregated from the hive by virtue of consisting of users that are explicitly trying to avoid it. And there's a perpetual risk that the forerunners of those communites are eventually sucked in by the Borg Cube of banal political debate regardless - we've all seen this happen in our feeds, and there's a good chance you've unfollowed or muted at least one person for abruptly and loudly picking up on some political or social topic.
This is pretty much exactly what Mastodon is trying to avoid. Having over-subscribed political debate forums hang a sign over their door is definitely fine by me.
In many other cases, reddit’s model works better too. It just isn’t definitively one or the other.
That's an apt description of the phenomenon.
Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account.
Reddit is about the subreddit's popularity
Twitter is about personal popularity
Reddit doesn't actually solve that problem because subreddit moderators often run ban scripts that check which subreddits you have interacted with. If you happen to talk to the wrong people, you wind up banned and need a new account to talk to other people.
I made a user-centric version of this and it's the only thing that has made Reddit usable. All the people who participate in toxic communities are just gone, invisible. I don't have to see them, their replies don't show up in my inbox. It's absolute bliss. I'm sure there are plenty of false positives but I really don't care since the value of any particular user's comments is zero.
Like people seem to intuitively get that /r/all is only usable once you filter out basically everything; my own list has a little over 1200 subreddits on it and then you add in keywords.
It was the same with Twitter. The enjoyment and usability skyrocketed once you used a recursive blocker on worst kinds of people.
I can understand the frustration but it's really hard to argue with the results.
Reddit ban "biological terrorism"
Source: Absurd amount of time on Reddit.
Reddit is popularity of the subreddit centric. So your own personal popularity doesn't really matter. Its why people make throw-away accounts all the darn time.
Twitter is about personal popularity. This is why it is so important on twitter to have personal recognition.
Mastodon is reddit style moderation, with twitter style identity/popularity.
Broken analogy. You can get banned from any subreddit for any reason, but you won't need a new account, because you can still be on all the other subreddits and communicate with other users.
Also, with over 140K combined karma (90K comment, 45K post karma, roughly), I have never experienced that issue on that 6-year-old account.
Basically a mod (anonymous because modmail) telling someone "Republicans are all the racists, say this or continue to be banned." ... in the fucking comics sub.
But to me, mods going off the deep end is just the latest cherry on top.
They killed themselves to me back in 2016/2017(?) when they changed their algorithms to try and stop r/the_donald, it all feels stale now, like it is only updated at most once a day.
The alternative is we revive OpenID, but good luck with that
i want to be able to go to a geopolitical mastodon and enjoy posting/reading there, and ignore the rest of the federation, but sometimes I want to see all like reddit's /r/all or the front page.
The problem is for people who are looking for a Twitter replacement, Mastodon isn't it.
If Mastodon wants to have communities, it should have a first class concept of communities where people can participate in as many of them as interests that they have. Servers aren't that.
It also seems not appealing to the many accounts who are only about influence or optimizing their follower count. Mastodon is like a reset button which is either a nightmare or a boon depending on what your original strategy was on twitter.
...that didn't read the article fully, because it addresses this point exactly.
Small communities aren't a problem. Having your account linked with just one of them is.
Imagine what reddit was like if you had to pick a subreddit and stick with it for the entire history of the account. You'd only be allowed to post on other subreddits if you are following the rules of That One Subreddit.
This is what Mastodon federation is like.
i’ve been on there for a few years and i can’t for the life of me see how any of this is even a concern for using it.
if you’re upset that some servers are more lenient than others, or that some servers have more active moderation, then just move servers. i’ve done it twice and it took like five minutes—you don’t lose followers or anything, they come right along with you as move…
Every single community that flourishes on Twitter eventually devolves into a set of people who spend all their energy complaining about something. You can choose to ignore the complaints, but after a while it just becomes too much. Once you've followed enough people to be part of a Twitter community, it's annoyingly difficult to undo that.
People will be people and the same toxic crap happens on Reddit and Discord. These other platforms just provide an easy way to leave an entire community if you unhappy with the moderation policies and/or general group dynamics.
I personally enjoy being part of a community, getting to know the people around it, and get to chat about it in small discussion groups. I hope the Fediverse continues to evolve, and helps to build communities. Twitter has become too much about building an audience.
I think it's a very apt analogy that's broadly correct. The crucial difference is that Mastodon servers are not a scarce resource (unlike land & buildings), so you can shop around until you find an HOA that you like, or just start your own.
You must have joined Twitter quite late then. In the early days people complained that Twitter was silly because people tweeted things like what they were having for breakfast. Those complaints were a form of social control - peer pressure really - that drove people to use Twitter for Serious Things instead.
quoting DIRECTLY from the post
> the ideal solution would be to [...] have some way to create "forum-like" instances where no accounts can be created but where specific and highly moderated discussions can take place.
If a user is bothering someone on your instance, then either your instance or that users instance could take action.
If your instance bans them, they won't be banned anywhere else. If their instance bans them, they will be fully suspended.
It's way more inconvenient to create a new account for each forum (including this one), which is hardly inconvenient.
And it's even easier on Mastodon because you don't enven need one account per server !
For all the talk of peculiar rules, I haven't seen any servers with peculiar rules. There seems to be a general understanding that a server may be set up to focus on tabletop gamers, or STEM nerds, or journalists, that doesn't mean they can't also talk about politics, or movies, or whatever they want.
But ultimately, even if the fever dream hypothetical dystopia were real, people are free to set up their own dedicated servers just for themselves. That is, in fact, a point in favor of the federation model. There are a number of dedicated mastodon hosts already[0] for those who don't want to roll their own from scratch, and more will probably come online with time.
Just a really, really dumb assessment.
0. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/#so-you-want...
The peculiar rules aren't written down. Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want.[1] This can include DMs that both parties are fine with (but not the server admin, who can read them), or behavior off of the site.[2][3]
The problem isn't solved if you go through the trouble of setting up your own server. De-federation is common[4] (often for absurd reasons[5]), and blacklists are shared across many instances.[6]
1. https://twitter.com/triketora/status/1594348646396559361
2. https://twitter.com/WashburneAlex/status/1605268536930213907
3. https://twitter.com/LefterisJP/status/1593934653114785793
4. https://fba.ryona.agency/scoreboard?blockers=50
5. https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705
6. https://github.com/weirderearth/weirder-rules/blob/main/sugg...
The fediverse implicitly asks the question: what if that assumption is wrong? What if we had as many of the affordances of (say) Twitter as we could get, but the global connectivity model of blogs? In the blogosphere, it hardly even makes sense to ask who's "blocked".
I remember the height of the blogosphere as a pretty happening time for discourse on the Internet, so it's not a silly question.
It wasn't; the blogosphere had no-one sitting in the place where Mastodon server admins sit. The closest equivalent would be, what, webring admins? But a single blog could be part of any number of webrings, so getting dropped from one wasn't a big deal, and I don't remember any shenannigans like banning members of another webring from commenting (and even if that kind of spat did happen, comment banning happened at the individual blog level, not at the "server" level).
Some people did get banned from the actual servers, e.g. Livejournal or Wordpress, but that was a Big Deal rather than something that happened over social drama between tinpot admins. I remember e.g. Dreamwidth being set up in response to some content policy, but that was a one-time event and a clear content policy. And even then, no-one was trying to block these whole servers off from each other; if anything they went out of their way to allow e.g. commenting under an account from somewhere else.
I believe the biggest threat to Mastodon is that it breaks up some of the control centralized governmental and corporate powers have to influence the way people think and feel a.k.a. winning the hearts and minds of the people. An interesting project might be to create some machine learning that tries to identify when Mastodon is being infiltrated by these entities.
The early Internet was full of professionals. There wasn't that much to censor because people were mostly crafting pages connected to their professional work, or showcasing their cool hobbies.
Once the normal people started flooding in, there was a lot of drama and a lot of censorship, it was just contained in silos. Forums had moderation, cliques and weird rules. A discussion about a game for kids could explode in drama, banning and rivalries, it just didn't spread very far like it does today, when you have whole sites and groups dedicated to cataloguing all the drama happening elsewhere.
i wish this absurd idea would disappear.
communities on the internet have _always_ banned people for all sorts of reasons. always. since bbs’, since irc, since forums, since email lists, and on and on and on.
always have.
Because I've gone through the whole IRC and early forums era of 20+ years ago. People got banned, formed their own IRC channels or forums colloquially called treehouses and life went on. Blogs were no different and if a blog was particularly bad it would get banned and the user would go and host their own blog elsewhere. Hell, you can go further back and see Usenet banning stuff related to white power groups.
In the past, you had to do some crazy stuff to get your blog taken down or get k-lined. Now your internet presence (and possibly your career) are at risk if you don't keep up with the new taboos.
1. Getting banned from Twitter means leaving a global namespace. Getting banned from the comments on someone’s blog was far less serious, and if someone on a group blog had a falling out it just meant that they setup another one (the Mastodon model). Earlier things like Usenet groups had moderation but people could easily move to another group.
2. The stakes were lower: the early internet was full of academics, professionals, etc. and still had this aura of not really mattering. That doesn’t mean that everyone was nice but the ratio was a lot better and it wasn’t anywhere near as coordinated – the creationists and Scientologists were both annoying but they certainly didn’t work together. The odds of some online flap even reaching the awareness of your friends, family, or coworkers were low and it probably would have seemed more like an amusing joke than something serious.
3. An American specialization of the previous point: the hardcore right-wing took over the Republican Party, successfully purged the moderates, and started recruiting young reactionaries. 9/11 changed what a lot of people felt was acceptable to say or do – I remember when Glenn Reynolds was a fairly normal-sounding law professor with a blog in that brief span before 9/11 & the war blogs broke him – and over the 2000s they felt fewer checks as their power & numbers grew. Obama getting elected brought a LOT of voices out which many of us had thought had disappeared in our parents’ or grandparents’ generation, and by the mid-2010s they were recruiting young people from anti-feminist communities in places like 4chan and Reddit (before GamerGate but that’s when it really ramped up). Nothing unprecedented in terms of message but the numbers and degree to which they were welcomed into the party and started setting the tone was dramatic. There’s a fair argument that some of those views were not uncommon before but had been more genteelly expressed, but I am reminded of how aggressively GOP leaders shut down David Duke in the 90s.
I mention politics not just because I think that normalized a lot of bad behavior but also because it changed how people responded. “Internet drama” wasn’t taken seriously but when it started having real-world consequences and impacting national politics, a lot of people - even those who self-described as free speech advocates – started reconsidering how best to respond. Volume also enters into the picture: the first time you see something, you might try to engage. By the dozenth time, you’re a lot more inclined to get out the ban hammer.
Yep. And I and maybe others are answering that question: Nope, we want a single namespace. And then fediverse proponents pop up to tell us actually we're wrong about what we want.
The primary thing I want from social media is algorithmic discovery. I love bumping into cool, interesting people I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. With the fediverse I can't even reliably see the past posts of someone I follow if they're on a different server.
from the link you provided, the admins respond:
"This post was removed by mistake and we apologize. We’ve recently hired more moderators and the post in question was falsely interpreted to be implying something it was not."
for [5], the journa.host server had a lot of problems out of the gate, including some suspicion they were sharing ban-evasion tools, but is not currently defederated for the most part. I follow lots of people on that host and I'm on a different server. the thread there illustrates the reasons which IMO were not unreasonable for a brand new server attracting a lot of attention with odd moves.
not that moderation isn't fraught with tons of problems, but I dont think large servers have admins that are capriciously banning people for made-up reasons the way Musk has been doing on Twitter.
As Twitter has imploded, people have increasingly complained about unrepresentative strange examples that don't accurately reflect the day-to-day experience of being on Mastodon.
Apparently the same thing happens on Twitter now. If the "Twitter Files" are to be believed, it's happened for a long time before that.
Frankly, I think all of this absurd rule-making is fine. If you disagree with it, nobody can stop you from creating your own instance and federating with all the great/terrible sites you want. The irony that these 'sky is falling' posts come from lifelong Twitter users feels like the icing on the cake. Nobody owes you anything on the internet; not Twitter, not Elon, and not the few-thousand instance admins who host servers out-of-pocket.
https://fba.ryona.agency/scoreboard?blockers=300
I looked at mastodon.social, and I don't see any entries in their list where the reason is "federates with bad servers":
https://fba.ryona.agency/?reverse=mastodon.social
OTOH here's an example of a small instance which does this sort of thing:
https://fba.ryona.agency/?reverse=freethought.online
So, which big instances are doing this?
Truth social defederated itself.
As long as it's possible, it will happen.
But Mastodon and ActivityPub do attempt to mitigate this - you can run your own instance (and of course, you’re not entitled for someone else to republish you) to seize back some of that control. Followers and follows are a lot more portable, so it’s easier to move instances (which is party automated)
That's another feature, not another bug.
Don't like the admin's moderation style or rules, etc on a particular? Move to a different one. Simple.
Not that it's not a problem on a centralized site either mind you, as the Twitter Files have been revealing.
I’ve been wondering how much this scales. Surely if a large number of people did this, it would create a massive NxN mesh that would force instances to only federate with larger instances?
>Just a really, really dumb assessment.
Your argument boils down to "run your own instance", which has specifically been addressed in the article. Perhaps instead of repeating the word "dumb", you could read it.
Regarding "run your own instance": sure, just like we all are running are email servers, right? Shouldn't be that hard to set up, right?
Not like there would be any issues with getting on one of the many blacklists[1] maintained by God knows who that you'd have no practical means to get removed from, right?
Right.
I have seen two just today, listed explicitly in the rules of distinct servers, without particularly looking:
• No content that's illegal in UK or Germany.
• No crypto.
I also don't know the specifics of German law, so the fact that my account could get suspended for violating something I am not aware of is peculiar in itself. The point is that there is no single privacy policy and single jurisdiction to worry about - it is a guess, depending on where the instance is hosted, and may even move under you without notice.
[edit: I am in the process of selecting an instance personally - I have not decided yet, and the process of picking one seems somewhat fraught.]
> I have not decided yet, and the process of picking one seems somewhat fraught
as someone who has been on mastodon for quite some time, i highly recommend one of the general servers and then not worrying about it from there. there’s an awful of lot of nonsense panic from people about “oh noes! which instance!”
i just looked and these are a few of general servers that are open right now
mstdn.plus mas.to geekdom.social mstdn.social mastodon.world mstdn.party
also, after you join, one of the first things you may want to do is use one of the tools to find people who you followed on twitter. something like movetodon (super easy) or fedifinder (a little more difficult).
good luck! if ya have any questions, lemme know.
> admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish. what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance?
You then proposed two things that don't make sense to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
I called it like I see it.
Of course I made my first profile on the generalist one, but I quicky discover I couldn't post on the timeline of the music or videogames one. I could only reply to already existing discussions, which was fine but gave me a big sense of passivity. This is a real problem for which I now propose a solution.
If you think it's fine that the only people who can post in a specific community are the ones who have an account there (= giving all your data to the server admins) then maybe you have a completely different view of what should be possible on Mastodon.
That's technically true, but who cares? The instance timeline isn't a "community", it's just a particular filter applied to the global timeline. The communities of videogame and music enthusiasts are larger than any one instance, and can follow one another across instances, and see each others' tagged posts in searches across instances.
Defaults matter. Usability matters. If that particular filter is the one that the community uses to communicate with each other, then who's included or excluded from that filter becomes very relevant.
One can always drop by https://mastovue.glitch.me every so often to tour the local TLs of instances in the neighborhood (https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/mapstodon/) to see if there's anyone worth following.
Joining a server feels like I'm hanging out in someone else's backyard. There's this feeling that at any point I could be asked to leave if I overstay my welcome. The server I'm attached to is run by someone who seems very friendly and so far I'm enjoying the community they're trying to build. However, I am struggling to wrap my head around this weird intersection of public broadcast over a semi-public (someone's backyard) space.
Unlike Reddit or Discord where I can partake in multiple forums through my single account, my entire public persona on Mastodon is tied to the server I'm on. It really limits what I want to share as I don't feel as free to talk openly about any topic.
Owners of medium sized servers will tire of the maintenance and moderation.
I like the idea of leveraging some profit-motivated actors to make the experience smooth, but the open and federated nature helps ensure they don’t “own” the entire network.
I mean, the contents of my spam folder did originate with someone.
Am I missing something, and there are other implementations out there that interoperate? Or is the reference implementation of this standard the only implementation?
https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub#services
should get you started!
My understanding is that there is a single Mastodon implementation, but there are a number of similar projects which can interoperate by sharing data via ActivityPub to become federated. Some of these other projects implement all/most/some of the Mastodon REST API so that GUI clients (phone apps, etc) can be used for reading and posting. There was an article on LWN recently which listed several of these with some commentary [1].
You've also got some choices in front ends, I know Pleroma supports several. I strongly recommend not using Soapbox for a variety of reasons unless you really like its UI.
Hacker News seems to have an interest in finding things wrong with Mastodon. There are things wrong with Mastodon of course, but they pale in comparison to the problems of centralised internet that had nearly devoured the entire world. I'd like to see more talk about how to build and improve or solve actual problems rather than these usually pretty off-base complainy takes.
§Within the rules of decency, of course.
So it's great your FAQ says that and your topic is non-controversial and niche. But when applied en masse it's just a mass collection of extremely segmented bubbles. Nothing wrong with that. Niche forums are perfectly fine.
But lets not pretend that's a social network anything like Twitter, or FB, or Reddit circa 2012. Popular Mastodon servers ban hundreds of servers where users may have signed up but not known the extensive rules list of each other sub server (in addition to the [n] amount of moderated content).
We don’t exist in mastodon bubbles. we go out with friends. we visit families houses. we visit friends families. we visit dozens of other web sites. we interact with countless numbers of people every single day. we go to work. we go to school.
this “you’re going to live in a bubble!” panic is wild.
I also said there's nothing wrong with niche forums but social networks were a new phenomenon circa 2005+ and hundreds of millions of people like the idea of public information networks... for the same reason why newspapers, broadcast news, and cultural TV shows are so popular, but now with more direct participation.
So if you want to toss aside the new concept of public platforms for discourse and culture then that at least be honest about it. Don't pretend it didn't exist.
thats my point. we don't exist in bubbles. and while you didn't explicitly say this, i disagree with this notion that people keep panicking about, that mastodon or any other social media is creating some terrifying horrible "be very afraid" bubble.
again, we don't exist in bubbles, we exist in the real world where there are all kinds of different ideas. if i choose to spend my freetime online with people i get along with, this would be absolutely no different from spending my freetime in the real world with irl friends that i get along with--its no different. whether its mastodon or discord or going out to clubs with friends. if i go out with friends, its not some "be very afraid" bubble just because we don't have racists or homophobes out with us.
even if i were to start a mastodon server tomorrow and curate the users, this is no more a terrifying bubble than if i owned a music club and curated metal-heads or gothkids or whatever.
i'll say it again: it'll be ok--we don't exist in a bubble. we'll be ok.
The people who are raised on hypermodded Subreddits (and a hypothetical world where super constrained Mastadon servers replace Twitter/FB/<=2012 internet forums and comment threads) are not being taught to tolerate other opinions in their family, workplace, at universities, and high schools. And today much more broadly to newspaper columnists, blog platforms, Patreon accounts, Paypal/Mastercard merchant accounts etc, etc.
This isn't merely about which communities you opt-in and choose to follow. The market options to opt-in to are continually constrained and limited.
You see these same pressures exponentially being applied to everything, not just niche opt-in communities. It's a new culture of intolerance for the greater good. Guilt by association and zero nuance outrage campaigns.
Our culture is developing a zero tolerance policy to dissent and anything outside the Overton window. The only people I see how have no problem with this are people who:
A) have boring non controversial opinions or simply don't care
B) their ideologies happen to fit squarely in the overton window
C) generally don't participate in public discourse and are unaware of recent cultural developments... Or are simply naive they can't see the danger in slippery slopes where increasingly more moderate ideas get treated like Gaellio and blasphemy against God, but the mainstream safe culture is the new religion.
The "push a button to silence dissent" thing is what is expanding everywhere. Family dinners and IRL parties are one of the few bastions of tolerance but even that won't last long if the current culture continues.
There is no such thing as an "intellectual need". All the needs are fundamentally emotional. Mastodon addresses the identity need, it creates the sense of a community, and, as all the social media, it grants both cheap entertainment and immediate gratitude for conformity. It is a good "social network", it's just what we call a phenomena of "social network" is essentially shit.
Well, in a certain sense, he is describing one mechanism of the peculiar popularity of sites like 4chan; however, I think it just highlights how incomplete the thesis is. There's clearly much more to it than just these simple mechanics.
I remember the days of small forums dedicated to niche topics. They usually had an “off-topic” board where members could socialize and talk about whatever. It was not limiting at all.
Even in the case of a single identity everywhere, it gives your followers a way to control which types of posts they see from you. Maybe they don't care about my explorations in UI design and programming and just want to see what pastries I've been cooking lately, in which case they can follow my account on a cooking-oriented Mastodon instance.
That's actually one of my minor gripes with Twitter; it had no way to filter for topic which meant that even though I followed people I had an interest in my timeline still had a lot of stuff in it I didn't care about.
Has the author actually used Mastodon? I wonder what server they ended up on to have this impression. And I find the claim that people don't want to run generalist instances... interesting. I ran a few of these and while they all had a theme and a few cultural baselines (which is okay, other instances have other standards), none of them really restricted what you post about.
Probably http://dolphin.town — you're only allowed to use the letter E.
I've always felt I would like to be able to tweet only to the TopicA people or only to the TopicB people. But I don't really care that my user data is stored on the same instance as the people in TopicA or TopicB. So maybe a better model for federation would be that you can host your user on an instance, and then also when you post, you are deciding which instance to post on.
At the same time, being on a generalist server (mastodon.social) I really couldn't possibly care less about looking at the trending posts on my server as that is just a general slice of mastodon users and I am not in any specific community with them. I want to subscribe to specific niche/thematic mastodon instances for my feed.
(Even your comment sort of works - I'd drop the emphasis on "up" and "place" though.)
It's definitely atypical. I think it wouldn't impact readability all that much, if not for the lack of capitalization at the start of sentences - the two abnormalities together make the text much harder to read than it should be.
Generally I find that the more people rely on emphasis and formatting, the poorer their writing skills are.
"ideal distribute small generic. don't possible fantasy dreaming."
The ability of people in a federated social network to create arbitrary, independent instances with rules tailored for particular discussion topics is a feature, not a bug. If you don't like that... well, don't go on topic-specific Mastodon servers I guess.
Are you advocating for Mastodon to have SSO? If so, I can get on board with that.
Are you advocating for a cap on the number of members of a particular instance? Mastodon can already do that - all you have to do is not approve new accounts. Of course, the inherent problem with that is that activity in member-capped servers will gradually die out, and now you need way more admins... your idea, not mine.
I also agree with madrox's comment that having specific instances with peculiar rules according to taste is a feature, not a bug.
Heck, I agree with everyone calling out this article here, because it's just a bad take.
Communities of like minded people are bad. We shouldn't encourage people to gather with like minded folks.
"the ideal solution would be to distribute all these users between many small and generic instances with no silly domain names or draconic rule sets"
Self expression, humor, and fun are bad! I shouldn't be forced to adhere to your community guidelines! Only boring domains should be allowed! Only rules I like should be allowed!
o....m....f....g....
</sarcasm>
just because you agree with the prescription doesn't mean it isn't a prescription.
they said: "admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish."
I said "Email is not a good messaging platform. Every server has its own rules and expectations. Completely different terms of service on each one."
i simply replaced the concept of social network with the dominant alternate federated messaging protocal that has the same properties. (every email server has terms of service that dictate rules and expectation of usage) I didn't address the "highly limited set of conversations and content" part because it's a complete misapprehension of how those server rules work. While i'm sure there's 1 or 2 exceptions to this servers do not dictate what you can talk about beyond "no hate speech" kind of dictation. A Star Trek server, for example doesn't mean people are ONLY allowed to talk about Star Trek. It just means it's a server for folks who like Star Trek.
they said: "what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance?"
I responded "Communities of like minded people are bad. We shouldn't encourage people to gather with like minded folks.
All groups of like-minded people have rules about what is and is not acceptable speech amongst them. To suggest otherwise is ignorance in the extreme. He's specifically advocating for NOT having instances like that. He's advocating against a core aspect of groups of like minded people if you don't have common (spoken or unspoken) rules around acceptable topics the group will NOT continue to exist. It's WHY we stick with a group. To advocate against something is to make a valuation of it being "bad". He's advocating against groups of people with rules about acceptable conversation topics. Therefore they are saying that communities of like minded people with the rules that cause them to come into existence and stay in existence are (to them) "bad". this isn't a misrepresentation. It's actually thinking about the logical implications of their words.
they said "the ideal solution would be to distribute all these users between many small and generic instances with no silly domain names or draconic rule sets"
Their commentary about "silly domain names" in context is obviously derogatory. Silly domain names ARE self expression and humor and fun. He is advocating against them, thus he's saying they are bad. Yes, i was hyperbolic, but it's not actually a misrepresentation. Suggesting that the rules of most servers are "draconic" is itself either hyperbole or massive misunderstanding of those rules. It seems hyperbolic, and thus he is suggesting that being forced to adhere to other people's rules is undesirable. I said "I shouldn't be forced to adhere to your community guidelines!" again. not misrepresenting anything. Hypebolic yes, but also accurate. Saying "Only rules I like should be allowed!" is just repeating the same idea another way. It's, again, not a misrepresentation. They never say they're unwilling to follow rules. Only that rules of small servers are "draconic" and there is the _strong_ implication that they don't want to be forced to adhere to them.
So. with that in mind. What _exactly_ do you think i've actually misrepresented? What interpretation of their statements did i get wrong?
I sincerely ask you to read the post again, what you just wrote relly shows you've completely misrepresented everything
very few people have silly email addresses because they realize sending their CV or writing to a friend or collegue with fuckjoebiden@racism.ftw is insane. but somehow when creating their main online account on mastodon they sign up to the silliest instances and bind their own identity to these niche communities
Are you limited to one instance or persona? Feels like an assumption based on twitter style advertising requirements where they don't want multiple sign ups as it maks it harder to track you.
I think, we need to go back to the basics with people. You are allowed to have more than one email, for example. Facebook brainwashed people into believing they can only be one thing online.
I prefer many anonymous accounts.. but i think those days are moving further and further behind us.
Soapbox (web FE, also Pulpit, Mangane since they are forks) handles multiple ogged in accounts on the same instance (which is handy if e.g. you've got an admin/mod role account or you've got a lot of bots on there.)
Pretty sure this will be a common feature in frontends that get popular in 2023.
By having so few generalist instances the risk is that they grow too large and gain too much power over the fediverse.
I am so absurdly out of touch with "most people"...
Back when I was a teenager, I was told not to create accounts under my own name. I have many silly E-mail accounts. E-mail can be a professional medium. You don't apply via Twitter DM, I hope.
>bind their own identity to these niche communities
Just migrate if you don't like it anymore.
I was hiring recently, and one of the ways we advertised the position was that I tweeted the job description, and I arranged with the our social media team for them to retweet it for additional visibility. Candidates responding to that tweet generally contacted me via twitter DM - why wouldn't they?
It's not like I conducted interviews in that medium, but it's not really any different than the people who initiated contact via email.
>You don't apply via Twitter DM, I hope.
If a company has a Twitter, why wouldn't I? Many young businesses less revering of e-mail gladly use Twitter as a valid avenue for these kinds of communications.
>just migrate
Mastodon handles migration terribly. You can either redirect or straight up move. In both cases your old profile is still in full display and your posts don't transfer.
What a world...
But who you are within Mastodon is not limited by the instance you created your account on! Especially since follows and posts are federated.
A gentle reminder that your follows, Home feed, hashtags and the Federated timeline are not (overly) limited or filtered by the instance your account lives on. Only the Local timeline is 100% a view specific to that instance.
I've been using for a while and, especially during recent times,my gut says the author's just wrong here; not my experience and also not likely to happen -- even if that's what some people think they want.
My belief is that the collective "want" for something like Twitter, plus the superior model for doing so, will drive Mastodon to be effectively the new Twitter.
Roughly, I think the human desire to "be up on everything" aka the desire for a "town square" will override this "divided up little spaces" thing.
Two things make me optimistic about that. The first is the personal experience of watching a strong push for "Content Warnings" and the subsequent mostly-dismantling of that idea (owing to the fact that it became apparent that the sort of thing some people wanted to be warned against was also the very thing you should be paying attention to, mostly in the realm of racism).
But the second and bigger feels like the killer here, if companies are smart enough to figure it out.
On Mastodon, companies and corporations can be their OWN primary source of truth. No Eli Lilly Situation. They're starting to catch on.
The protocol itself could be amended to include a set of very high-level tags. Say for example, politics, sports, TV, movies, gaming, celebrities, fashion, personal, and NSFW. Don't have one of those? Your post won't be federated.
Then if you're on a Mastodon instance dedicated to (for example) Porsche cars, you would have custom tags available by default for models, engines, make years, and so on to enrich the metadata.
Mastodon already lets users subscribe to hashtags so much of the baseline functionality already exists, other than the control aspect.
Or rather tags have groups under an hierarchy to which groups someone post. Something like comp.os.linux or comp.lang.python. Oh, wait...
I've been using Mastodon for years, part of a community of no more than 10,000 people (we have a cap for reasons I'm not going to get into) and it's fine.
I also got my own instance, like I have my own email.
Mastodon isn't Twitter or Facebook, it's not designed to be that way.
Also just run your own instance?
Close. I'ld have said host your own instance.
But on the other hand, if I allow that, other servers will de-federate from me.
So these last few months I've been put into a lot of hard moderating situations. Where for example an entire instance reports a user on my instance, saying it's spreading hate speech, or transphobia, but it's not. The user just happened to use an aggressive tone in a thread with a famous person, for example, or just piss off the wrong admin.
And now I have to make a decision on how to handle this user, who didn't break any of my server rules.
And I even ran into a straight up racist on my instance, but didn't suspend their account because while they were clearly a supporter of the right-wing party, that same right-wing party has a majority vote. So why should I suspend them for voicing their political affiliation? Again, not breaking any rules, not breaking any laws, just voicing opinions in line with the current right-wing majority party.
I just don't believe in sweeping people under the rug. In that case, of the right-wing person, they ended up getting muted by other instances, fortunately not de-federated.
But it feels like I'm always balancing on a knife's edge between free speech and a de-federated instance.
Basically, I feel myself becoming a "language-police", and that's not what I want.
Much of the active fediverse have had quite particular culture with very narrow corridors around some things, of all varieties. Some of these groups (in lack of better word) demonize each other. Those who take up running open general instances for years with no financial incentive are sometimes also of a particular kind within that.
Some are also intentionally insular ("safe spaces" come to mind) and will mute or defederate anyone identified as not part of their in-group.
I've also seen instances blanket-blocking anything Pleroma, because "all the bad people come from Pleroma". I've even seen it called evil software because it affords more customization of filtering, rewriting, and federation.
If the fediverse does get traction over time and the demography widens, I think we'll have much fracturing, possibly pushing protocol changes and incompatible forks.
For now: Haters gonna hate, what can you do about it
And God help you if you use or let your users have the option of using the Soapbox Front End (FE) on top of Pleroma.
The instance is really a technical concept, which allows for the federated hosting model. It hosts your Fediverse identity and while you can migrate, it's not seamless.
Most people don't want to belong to just one community, so while an instance gives you a default community, it should not be the only mechanism of community. I don't think there's a widely distributed community concept, but hopefully, one will evolve. Something akin to the feature set of Facebook groups.
This is very solvable, and I'm guessing that if Mastodon continues to gain in popularity, we'll see something emerge.
It's a bunch of small websites each with their own community.
Instead of one garbage Twitter replacement, we have thousands of individual Twitter-like websites each aimed at a particular community. There's one for any subset of interests you care to look for.
The magic of mastodon is that these websites can interact with each other. If you live on the LGBT programmer instance, you can follow and talk to people on the clam science facts server, or artists on the art server.
Then you also get to see all the accounts anyone on your server follows, and you discover new accounts and servers that way.
If you find a new server you like better, you can just pack up and move in a few clicks.
The model is closer to subreddits than it is to Twitter.
Mastodon is a fundamentally different thing, and people keep having panic attacks because they want to frame it as Twitter and it doesn't fit. It's different, and you need to adjust your perspective. Once you appreciate mastodon for what it is, it's a pretty neat platform.
1. Nobody wants to maintain a generalist instance, partly because it's harder to apply generalist moderation policies and partly because it attracts so many more users.
2. Running your own instance does solve (1), but Mastodon was not designed as a P2P network and likely can't function that way.
I run my own and while my local feed is dead (even though I am not the only one on it), "home" and "federated" are fairly lively after following a few people.
i’m not sure what ya mean, the largest instance is generalist.
almost all of the most populated instances are also generalist:
mastodon.social
mastodon.cloud
mastodon.online
mstdn.social
mas.to
mastodon.world
and on and on.
there is no shortage of smaller generalist servers either.
i may be misunderstanding your larger point tho?
Is there a single instance which forbids you from talking about a certain topic?
I really don't see the issue, even hyper specific instances let you talk about other things. Where is the actual problem? Why would it matter that your account is some specific instance?
if the topic is at all sensitive, sure. Most instances have terms of service, and those could forbid it.
I'm sure there are plenty of other instances that behave the same way according other areas of the political spectrum. This has just been my experience when I wanted to sign up 5 years ago, when most people using this platform were left leaning and tech savvy
Of course Mastadon instances usually do not federate with freezpeech = nazi instances, so ..c
You seem to be disappointed with the left-wing ideology, not Mastodon itself. Leftist will not tolerate anything other than what they think is right, so it's expected that they will ban everyone who doesn't share their mindset.
Not all leftists are like this. Some of us actively enjoy and even prefer discussing our political opinions with those who disagree.
That said, I know the type of people you're referring to, and they tend to be insufferable to deal with.
In my experience, the insufferable ones tend to dominate communities, making the entire place unappetizing. You can see this effect on Mastodon too. A tiny group makes all the posts, and they have 100% ideological consistency.
I think that's an effect much more important than arbitrary rules of an instance, because this happens before it. People aren't banned, they are discouraged from posting at all and become the silent majority.
I suppose that's true.
I'm not disappointed with any ideology and this had nothing to do with politics. Please don't charge my opinion with ulterior motives
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Other issue which may not matter so much if you're "a fascist capitalist pig" is that your instance will likely be blocked by left wing Fediverse nodes. This can get silly, there are blocklists that often cite as cause nothing more than the software "right wing" nodes use, or in one case written by a particular developer. Too much of the Fediverse is that tribal.
For a concrete example, look at how TERF spinster.xyz federates with "right wing" nodes and is blocked by many left wing ones, including all the ones I could look up just now with a Google search.
I use scare quotes for right wing because many of these sites are politically neutral or thereabouts.
Anything that could be written comfortable behind the screen tends to be soon or later extreme and toxic. Real conversations are less extreme on both sides, because factor of danger from others is more real.
Also anything that has man in middle that decide what is bad or good to post or anything that can be voted also change organic flow of conversation and make it unnatural and eventually selfcensored.
This concludes me to abandon social networks completely. HN is only exception for now.
- if the whole point of the article is to illustrate how Mastodon might end up being centralized-light that's a tacit admission that it would not be a good thing
I think it's possible to come up with a great solution, but there's a lot of unexplored territory.
i am seeing a whole lot of criticisms of mastodon that, to me, sound like “social networking sites have always been bad, therefore mastodon must also be bad.” surely we can muster a little more optimism than that.
i just posted my own “come to jesus” moment.
Most people don't want to link their online persona to instances with stupid names and very strange rules. So they all flock to the more generalist ones which are few and far between and have an established user base and reputation. Since generalist instances are not "cool" to administer, only a few dedicated people maintain them and they will keep being few and grow larger and larger
He figured this is due to not being listed properly on some of the onboarding pages. He had tried to get on it, but failed. He then continued to collect some stats on all instances (which is difficult) and came to the conclusion that 90% of Mastodon instances have < 10 users, and most are closed/private.
If true, then yes...users will flock to a small group of large instances. Which makes sense, you want to go to where the most people are, it's the entire point of a social network.
If exponential growth continues (which I doubt), it will lead to existential problems. In costs, moderation, compliance, etc.
- older than 3 years or more than 10M€/year of revenue
- 5 million unique visitors per month
i happened to find a “generalist” mastodon instance without really trying. i just read a few twitter ex-pats for awhile, to get the lay of the land, and picked one. i sent an email to the administrator, offering to donate some money, because i couldn’t find a donation link. if this one doesn’t work out, i’ll pick a different one. or run one myself!
again: your criticism sounds to me like “social media has never worked, therefore mastodon also can’t work.” i choose to believe that there is something beyond the status quo.
> your criticism sounds to me like “social media has never worked"
There is an entire paragraph where I explain exactly what functionality could be added to Mastodon to at least make it possible to be better. In its current state I believe it's bound to develop this behavior with no way to fix it
Name one social media site and then explain how it was a net positive for society/outweighed all of it's toxic aspects.
in that respect, federation is the answer. take the power away from anybody who could screw it all up for us.
No dark-cryptic algorithms, promoted creativity in coding, design and music. You knew the people you added. Made socialising easier.
That isn't something one can objectively measure.
Would that not bring us back to a centralized service that can decide a person is toxic and is globally banned?
* its not a single platform but a constellation of federating servers based on different stacks and technologies. the specific mastodon implementation of activitypub is neither built-in nor required to participate in the fediverse. enabling different technologists/stacks to compete in a common arena will have an accelerating effect in how social networking evolves
* its not closed source: people/communities having other ideas about "the best social network" are free to fork, implement and experiment with said ideas. this augments the previous point and will further enable exploring the space of possibilities
* its not a single instance: within the confines of a specific design / implementation one can still tweak both hard configurations and soft rules to achieve specific community aims
* maybe most importantly: it enables potentially alternative business models beyond the winner-takes-all surveillance capitalism model that has come to destroy social networking (and much else as well). think of public funds, non-profit, more commercial interest-based instances etc
granted, its all still largely in the realm of potentialities and one could imagine all sorts of patches that will be required as weaknesses reveal through adoption and use, but many negative reactions at this point seem just intellectual laziness (or something worse).
in a sense it is a benign coincidence that the most mature expression of the emerging fediverse has been mastodon (and the mastodon.social instance), which is a twitter lookalike. combined with the convulsions of the bird site this creates the perfect conditions for people to get exposed to alternate realities and breaking the TINA spell. This is particularly true for all sorts of institutions, luminaries etc active on twitter that have provided the platform with a legitimacy it does not really deserve
This sounds like the Thatcherism of social networks. "There's no such thing as a community, only individual posters". The sort of desolate environment that you get as a result of this is exactly what people are increasingly shunning.
It's why people move to private chat groups, subreddits, niche twitter subcultures with memes that nobody even understands from the outside (intentionally so). This very site is strongly opinionated as well. The logical endpoint of generic platforms is the Youtube comment section.
If a social network is supposed to be social it has to be about something. There needs to be something that ties the people in it together. Any video game speedrunning community, music subculture, whatever have you is more interesting than generic sites. Even if you have to move between groups sometimes, that cost is well worth it. The real world doesn't work like this either. Does anyone ever go to the "generic people meetup, where we do generic things"? Everyone is part of social networks, plural.
"I personally don't think this will ever be possible, it can only serve as some nice little fantasy to keep me dreaming for better online spaces."
This can never work because generic instances have absolutely nothing that prevents them from growing. After all if a space has no strong, unique characteristics, there's nothing that stops anyone from coming in. This is the ultimate fate of every unopinionated internet community, it "Eternal September"'s itself.
The physical decentralization of Mastodon instances and the resulting tendency towards having unique instances with strict rules is the only thing stopping those instances from growing into a giant blob.