Fediverse

@anticurrent It took me multiple tries and multiple weeks to find a fediverse home. Compared to the 5 second single silo commercial options that’s like geologic onboarding time.

I think we gradually got accustomed to a “benevolent dictators” model of internet use, and decentralization of social is more like 90s internet where you had to learn what websites or services to go to by reputation, referral, and by trial and error.

Even well intentioned flagships will hit the “uh oh this is expensive to operate AND expensive to curate” problem. When you get above a few thousand concurrent users, screening malicious activity (e.g. bots, fraud, trolling, sock puppeting, extremism) requires increasing effort. At some tipping point of concurrent users, you max out your capacity to deal with it effectively, and then quality significantly degrades for everyone involved (including society apparently lol).

It’s easy to see the problems, but hard to think of alternatives.

My only current theory is: services have to stop being designed around the idea that everybody will get along, that everyone having public exposure is always 100% beneficial to them, and that all speech is harmless (even in democratic societies that taut rights to speech, most also have exclusions for harmful speech, such as “fighting words”, “genocidal incitement”, “injurious denial of established fact”, etc)