RQG

deleted by creator

Polar bears love it.

The amount of knowledge within the community and the representation of niche subcommunities grows with amount of users. So within huge communities you can be assured you have an expert for nicht topic x somewhere. And even your most outlandish interest is followed by at least a few others. That is what I joined larger social media for at least.

Yes, I think it is blatantly obvious how little many people care about their privacy and data. This is the result of an astonishing lack of knowledge and education on the consequences of giving away your data. They cannot imagine how many types of data are stored about them and analyzed to gain all sorts of insights into their life, thoughts, ideas, views and social life. Often people don’t believe they have anything to hide which is always false because we are humans. The other is they underestimate or refuse to believe the the information which can be drawn from your data or the fact that ads and other forms of manipulation do in fact work on them.

I think both scenarios are absolutely possible and possibly huge have up and down sides. I just hope this cool place we got here will survive and stay cool. I find it impossible to predict what will happen at this point. Some instances will block meta and some won’t. Which is the nature of decentralization and the thing instance owners should do. Decide for their instance and the people on it what they think is right. People can then leave or join instances that align with their ideas. Shit is going to get real soon around here.

It does either way. As you said defederating threads makes an instance not viable for you. Many people might think that way. This defacto lessens decentralization and increases vulnerability to an eventual takeover.

And defederating threads has the issues you mentioned. Both comes with problems and in the end it might split the fediverse.

Or am I missing something?

Wikipedia was the example I had in mind as well for donation based large scale funding that works. Especially if you consider how over funded the project is as they divert money into tons of side projects while still having enough money in the bank to keep up the site for decades. It makes me hopeful this can work.

I see a danger in too explosive growth. It could lead to an unhealthy rapid change of the user base. This is why I would prefer a somewhat steady growth. But you are absolutely right in that there are big opportunity costs to not making use of the collapse of other platforms. Which with the continued enshittification of social media will likely continue.

Lastly I just want to say how happy I am that healthy discussion like this one are possible around here.

The article linked above describes how Google killed a federated service by EEE. If you are interested how it can work I’d recommend it.

After EEE is done the fediverse would be irrelevant and lack users. But course it doesn’t stop people from making their own servers and federating into small communities. But the vast majority of users would use the meta version which was eventually made incompatible with the fediverse. That made 99% of users go there. And I if you ask someone to join your fediverse groups they’ll wonder why you are not on the meta thing instead.

I only see widespread adoption happening through commercial entities setting up instances, the model of donation-supported admins simply doesn’t scale.

Why do you think donation based doesn’t scale? If x percent of users donate and the server cost per user scales linearly it does. Also as large User numbers are reached you will find some power users which free to play games call whales. I don’t see how it doesn’t scale financially.

It will take longer if no big company very involved but I don’t think we are in a hurry here. I’m not on the building a little garden side of things. It’d be great if eventually all social would be open source and decentralized. It’s a must to keep our societies and democracies intact even. You can’t enormously powerful tools of mass communication and mass manipulation in the hands of companies and closed source algorithms nobody knows what they do.

I do like your counterbalance argument. If multiple tech companies come in competition might reduce the risk of EEE. And I do hope decentralization reduces the risk of them putting their own sorting algorithm on things and then killing other apps by not adhering to certain standards or something.

“company I can trust”

About that …