(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


I’ve seen at least three hagiographies for Mastodon in the past 48 hours. I fear this won’t end well. #Mastodon #Threads #EternalSeptember2

2023-10-20 22:01:02+00:00

I’ve seen at least three hagiographies for Mastodon in the past 48 hours. I fear this won’t end well. #Mastodon #Threads #EternalSeptember2

For context: from 1989/ish to 1997/ish, I was a USENET user, moderator and administrator – the latter C-News, LeafNews and INN, first at aber.ac.uk and then much more notoriously as the manager of uk-usenet.uk.sun.com.

Moore’s Law has rendered any mention of megabytes or gigabytes to be meaningless in the modern day, but I fought a constant battle for maintaining service in the face of people treating the service as a commons, balancing the interests of people who and did not want to see different topics of content (including pornography) within limited storage space, acquiring enough storage resources for a service which was essentially run by a volunteer (me) – and eventually succumbing to the acquisition of Dejanews by Google which became Google Groups, so between that and the popularisation of NNTP / NNRP it was barely possible to justify an organisation running a USENET instance at all… and all of this is without mentioning the scale challenge which was raised by Eternal September / AOL opening access to USENET.

Mastodon is a pubsub protocol and will survive better than the bulk replication of gigabytes (terabytes?) of data per day, but it is still federated, and therefore neither centralised nor distributed, and therefore suffers the worst aspects of both architectures.

Meta’s Threads – assuming that it delivers on its promises – will make 33 million people or more suddenly Mastodon capable. There will probably be extant instances run by idiosyncratic administrators attempting to block access to Threads on ideological, anti-capitalist, spam, or privacy related grounds. We will be in a weird situation where niche political software administration choices suddenly become at-scale communitarian censorship. The norms will cease to be normal.

And the existing instance administrators will be scrabbling for resources and wondering where the money will come from?
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/107921
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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