hypothesis: if too many early users sign up on mastodon.social instead of other instances, federation will end up becoming a second-class feature. (imagine what email today would look like if gmail had existed in the 90s.)
other instances need to be able to compete with mastodon.social for growth, or https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 should be implemented.
@bcrypt Federation will never be 2nd class feature for me.
@Gargron @bcrypt I think that "too many users" is subjective (apart from scaling). If anyone thinks there are too many users around here, or too many douches, they can either move one, or run their own instance. This way, putting more pressure on any system, could help to balance the power over the federation as a whole.
Thoughts?
@tim @Gargron i am reminded of https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours as an example of too-many-users-on-one-node-of-a-supposedly-federated-system
@Gargron @tim @bcrypt
Hopefully symbolism like this will help pre-bake the culture into one that might avoid that trap.
I feel like this is a race to see who can run the largest instance so they can get advertising $$$ somehow :(
If we can get something like the Patreon model that @five talked about it might sidestep the incentive feedback loop further. I wonder if there are any easy to use decentralized server providers that can get fed money from shared cryptocoin wallet.
@ultimape @five @bcrypt @tim @Gargron I think a #platformcoop instance that's free to users with moderate and transparent ads could be a good thing. Particularly if it kicked revenue back to users based on content creation? So people could choose to pay a subscription to a node for ad-free experience, or transparently participate in a free to use space ad-lite that comps users any revenues beyond operating costs.
@ultimape that's 10 whole toots! @mattcropp
@mattcropp I personally don't think that would scale well. Hard to get advertising money without strong deals, and I think ti would only encourage users to game the system.
But I might be biased. I'm still not done writing my anti-advertising thing and it's 10k words (including quotes).