actually the thing about mastodon that keeps hitting me is that it's a return to the governance model of the internet of the 90s, which is the "local dictator", with a single admin or a small mod team who are the sole owners and operators of a site. and like, oh right, anybody who's only used, say, twitter and facebook and youtube and tumblr and myspace and so forth and so on would have had absolutely no exposure to, because all major social media platforms online for the past ten years or so have been huge corporate monoliths (or wannabe huge corporate monoliths). getting mad at brad on livejournal was a very different thing than getting mad at jack on twitter or david karp on tumblr, because lj was brad's site in a way that was very different from jack being CEO of twitter
@anthracite yeah, this really feels like a breath of fresh air after so long having all social interaction happen in big corporate silos!
and hey, _somebody's_ got to be the admins. you at least have the benefit of experience :p
@xax That's how mailing lists and webforums have always been, but the usual social media user probably doesn't know those exist.
@CarlCravens yeah, it's kind of hung around on the margins, in more insular groups... but i guess precisely because it's a more insular model it hasn't had a big social media explosion until federation made it really user-friendly
@xax I've seen people calling this approach "a step back" Or talk about it like it's a bad thing
Personally it's a hella good thing
@vahnj yeah, there were those posts like "it's impossible to ban nazis from mastodon b/c they could just set up their own instance", like, yes, an instance solely of nazis that almost nobody would want to federate with. but when you're used to site-wide global bans as the only way to maintain a community space...
@xax I've only been on, as you say, huge corporate megalith sites but didn't really have a problem understanding Mastodon? I feel like the problem is that a lot of people get into this expecting a social network, where in fact it's more of a small community/old-school forum type experience
@xax Now imagine a world where everyone has their own Mastodon instance – instances of one. (Let’s say it was trivial to get one and you didn’t have to have any technical knowledge.) So the “local dictator" becomes you. And anyone is free to follow (or block, etc.) your instance as they see fit. That’s the future I want to live in :)
@xax That's insightful. Thank you for putting that into words.
@xax I've used message boards as a point of comparison for friends who remember the fandom days of the '00s. It's a Twitter format, and there's cross-talk (like if, say, Allspark.com and TFW2005 had a cross-talk feature), but it's that same kind of local dictatorship.
@xax I guess echomail does sound like a reasonable point of comparison — except that the messages don’t take days to get through and instances don’t have to dial each other’s modems in the same hour to deliver them!
@xax
> it's a return to the governance model of the internet of the 90s, which is the "local dictator", with a single admin or a small mod team who are the sole owners and operators of a site
- come visit us at social.coop, the cooperatively owned and run corner of the fediverse, and see how things are actually very, very different :)
@xax its me, your local dictator :p
@xax I keep feeling like this has the same DIY energy as a local BBS back then. It’s exciting to see it again after so much centralizing! Even if all the folks who hit the net after it got all corporate have trouble understanding why you can’t claim @JaneDoe across the entire fediverse.
And it is also super strange to be the one running the bbs instead of the one dialing in. I feel old.