At the office, I saw Avigail was back at her desk.
“You were on vacation – did you have a good time?”
“Sure, how else could it be – Thailand!”
“No idea. I’ve never been; For me it’s either Europe or India.”
“There were lots of Indians there in Thailand – they had some kind of a holiday I think.”
“That would be Diwali; but I didn’t know Thailand was popular with Indians.”
“Well it’s nearby for them after all.”
“That’s true.”
The “Muskopalypse”
Yesterday was the first time I thought that the Fediverse might actually become mainstream. I watched as Greta Thunberg came on board, and saw her follower count go up to around 15,000 within the space of a few hours. On the other hand, she has 5,000,000 followers on Twitter, so I realized that I should calm down. Numbers are hard. Will the sea rise 30 meters by the end of the century or 2 meters over the space of the next 5,000 years? Will the Twitter permafrost really melt and mastodon clones roam the earth? I’ll leave it to the experts. Anyway, in my excitement, I wrote the following.
I think we will all want to thank Elon Musk, whatever we think about him, for what he has accomplished.
Masses of people are finally beginning to turn their back on one of the big commercial social networks while simultaneously joining a non-commercial federated one. I really hope that Mastodon and ActivityPub can hold together through this crush of new users and not piss them off too much, because the world really does need a safe, viable protocol for social media connection, and it also needs social media to be interoperable – regardless of whether we prefer commercial or non-commercial variants.
If a critical mass join Mastodon, and they and are happy with it, three things may eventually happen.
First, it could bring a chain reaction, causing people to discover the other ActivityPub flavours that offer alternatives to Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, etc – and possibly new ones that compete with other commercial social media providers.
Second, when, as we see already beginning to happen, the European Union becomes invested in the Fediverse, it may begin to legislate for interoperability, forcing the commercial social networks to open their walled gardens and allowing, for example, people on Mastodon to follow people on Twitter or Facebook and for people on Twitter to follow people on Facebook or the fediverse, all without leaving their chosen social media provider.
Third, the same rules regarding the limits of “free speech” will be enforced across the Fediverse, requiring Fediverse instance operators to moderate content. This is a huge problem because operators of large instances do not have the means to employ workers to moderate content. As far as I know, the Fediverse lacks even the ability to conduct AI assisted moderation.
Small instances have less of a problem because they are easier to moderate. Governments may not even enforce their laws over small instances with few users. (If so, there’s the question of the break-off point between “small” and “large” – a few hundred users?, a few thousand?, a million? Twitter has over 200 million active users, by comparison with which the whole of Mastodon is tiny.)
In any case, the necessity to moderate and block content could have implications for both large and small instances.
First, moderation is reported to be difficult by the maintainers of Mastodon’s larger instances. As instances grow, and especially if they need to comply with state-imposed moderation rules, they would need to employ workers to moderate content. This cost would need to be covered – probably by user subscriptions, though possibly (cringe) by the introduction of ads.
Second, we could imagine a scenario similar to what has happened with email: large instances could block small instances by default. With email, the big email servers like Gmail routinely discriminate against small and independent email servers in order to prevent the proliferation of spam.
With the Fediverse, it could happen that large instances would eventually block small instances by default, due to the headache and expense of moderation.
The Fediverse is still taking its first baby steps. We have no idea how it will be as a teenager or as an adult.