@evan Going by the comments, a bunch of people misunderstood the poll like I did: I thought this was a question about server size. Don’t I feel the fool now!
After reading your blog post, you can definitely switch my vote from ‘more small Fedi’ to ‘more big Fedi’.
Very thought provoking reading through each of the positions and examining my own reasoning, so thanks for making me think.
@evan to me the question isn't about the technical network itself, but how it is experienced.
The technical network can be as big, as long as it is sustainable at any one moment and still able to support the unique socio-cultural environment we hold dear.
In every day life I consume news and information from a big world, a knowledge network, but directly interact in a small world (many community groups, friends, family, etc).
Small world / big world networking is more of a social concept.
I read some articles on the topic, but they struck me as deeply authoritarian. People talking as if they have a practical ability, a right, and a moral duty to try to control all speech on earth.
There's a whole spectrum of people I disagree with on the fediverse. From people I violently disagree with and can't easily coexist with to people I disagree with but respect and would invite over for a beer irl, and the fediverse is largely about choice. I follow folks who I can tolerate, and those people post things and repost things, and sometimes I fly a bit too close to the sun and need to unfollow someone who is filling my feed with something just a bit too out there, but there's no global algorithm playing Jerry Springer so typically I see mostly stuff I can tolerate just fine and I can tweak things to keep it that way.
The people I disagree with need to be here. First because I disagree with most everyone on something including myself at times so I'd be awfully lonely if voices I disagree with disappeared, but second because it's vital to the health of discourse.
There are all kinds of hugbox out there for people who want them. They are extremely diverse in the types of people on them. The one consistent thing is that the level of discourse is much lower as a bunch of people who already agree just yell at the walls about how bad "the other" who isn't around is.
Fact is, sometimes people I disagree with have something meaningful to say. Sometimes I might straight-up agree, or I might agree but in a different way than they imagine, or I might disagree but I learn something by the interplay of ideas. The last thing I want is to have them silenced because I don't like what they have to say.
Yes, choice. Freedom to choose by your own agency where and with whom you hang out. In one's everyday life things are more about allow-listing. You choose whether to enter that seedy bar with the unsavory folks inside.
Current fedi more like shouting to your full audience by default w/ hardly any control how it spreads and reverberates. The implicit expectation that people should shut their ears if they don't wanna hear what you say. Serves some use cases, not most natural ones.
Also having a single 'identity' is unnatural, when you translate it to the social concept. In everyday life we have many identities.. or rather we show a different outward appearance that is 'tailored' to the social group we hang out with at a certain time.
In your office? You behave more professional with colleagues and clients, than you would with your intimate friends. Different identitites showing.
@evan What you present as one side gets its opinions fleshed out in little statements, and what you present as the other side gets its opinions followed by "[People who disagree] just don't get it", more than once. Do you think that's even-handed?
@maya I'm not sure what you mean. I've got about as much explanation of points in the Small Fedi side as the Big Fedi side. And one of the important aspects of Small Fedi is that if you don't share our principles, you probably shouldn't be on the fediverse.
@maya you might agree with other parts of the Small Fedi cluster, and not that one. That's OK. Not everyone is going to believe everything on that list.
@evan This constitutes feedback, then, that what you have written is not coming off as presenting varied viewpoints in the way that those who believe in them might. That seems like a shame, because there's definitely a lot worth chewing over on these topics.
@evan i skipped your poll because I wasn't sure of what you meant, but after reading your blog post I am "Big Fedi" all the way, with the exception that I don't want to see any single entity controlling the majority of accounts.
The goal should be one million instances of one thousand people each. If we cannot get past a thousand instances of a million people each we have failed...or still have a lot of work to do!
@msh@evan But the annual cost for instance with only thousand people would be almost the same as with several thousand.
I think that actually doesn’t matters on number of people but other things which I don’t know 🤷.
@tr12345 those sorts of costs would be the ones directly related to hosting such as storage, bandwidth and CPU. Management and moderation requirements do NOT scale the same way.
Up to say 1000 a server can be run informally by an individual or two. People who use that server are more likely to be a like minded group with more agreement on moderation decisions made by the operators.
From 1000 to 100000 you get into requiring formal governance and a good group of volunteers. There will be a greater variety of people and more conflicts to resolve and federated content will leak to and from the Dark Fedi more often requiring more moderation. This is probably the "sweet spot" where a cooperative like @evan has for his server can manage well.
To manage over 100000 you literally need to get Full Corporate and make it a business with staff on payroll even if it is nonprofit and not ad-based (like your instance runs ;) and the experience can deteriorate drastically IMO.
@tr12345@msh@evan
I don’t understand the rabid obsession with a micro-fediverse. There are economies of scale which, if ignored, make the total environmental/monetary cost of the fediverse explode as we go smaller and smaller per instance. I’d rather have admins build to a size that works for them and fill out their moderator ranks to meet their needs.
Tiny instances run by individual administrators reeks of feudalism and unexpected server downtown to me
@ClickyMcTicker economy of scale is a necessary evil that must be managed, not a goal to be pursued. What makes something economical can and often does make that thing flawed in some way.
I have run my tiny fiefdom for over six years. I know EXACTLY the costs and energy expended by my server. Let me assure you this is nothing at all like a cryptocoin mining operation, and should the fediverse end up consisting of millions of small instances it would have no meaningful effect on environmental/energy costs either way. Fedi is best suited as an upgrade to websites, not an addition to them, and there are already millions of websites.
As for downtime...well I guess that depends on how big you like your points of failure vs how many 9s you require (there is a diminishing return on that compromise too)
Anyways, the thing that puzzles me is how a million little clubs, communes and co-ops sounds more like feudalism than 5 psychopathic dudes and their data centres.
@evan I'm increasingly thinking of a policy of "limit all instances with more than 15,000 active users". Maybe even lower.
A principle of fedi that I see: An important tool of moderation is the ability to block or limit other instances that are poorly moderated.
When an instance is too big, this becomes too course of a tool. It means instances are "too big to fail^H^H^H^Hblock." So it follows that we shouldn't let instances get that big.
this is the major danger of #threads imo. that the only good reason for blocking a server imo, that they don't police their users that harass others, becomes a question of also disconnecting your server from the vast majority of fedi users. ugh.
@evan I can try. glad you find the concept interesting too.
I'm nodding to the fact that there may be other useful dimensions of network health other than a single big/small vanity metric, and that optimizing for big/small may come at cost of network/user resilience and health, or favor some more than others. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
In many real world networks, no participant has a top-down view and so cant know whether their subnetwork is big or small compared to the rest. The network as a whole is not always 'legible' and that can be a good thing, even if its different than how most web companies and some ecosystem actors are used to ('legible' in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State )
@evan most i just think the network science literature is fascinating and we can all probably benefit a lot from it. And I'm very ok not knowing whether the fedi is big or small so I wasn't sure how to vote.
Add comment