TL;DR: The web is entering a new era, in which communities can move independently through the digital landscape. Parallels with the book “Dawn of Everything” by Graeber and Wengrow sugg…
I hear you, but it certainly requires certain skills to run an instance. It’d be curious to think about what the IRL equivalents are. My mind immediately goes to booking rooms/venues for events and sending emails, and then for digital, starting a discord/slack or Facebook group or subreddit, all of which also isn’t particularly hard and doesn’t require special skills.
But as the Fediverse professionalizes, this will only get easier. At some point, network effect will kick in and you just want to be a part of that. Yes, you could just make a discord server, but with a little more effort, you make a fediverse instance, where you already have a huge potential of possible users.
The threat here could be of course, that this professionalization comes again with centralization, for example with a service like Wordpress, where you can easily setup your own Mastodon instance (not ideal). But I’m confident that the counter-culture in the Fediverse will work against that.
Maybe. One can hope. In the end though, my impression of how the broad structure of the fediverse has panned out is that we really shouldn’t underestimate the tendency for people to centralise.
Mastodon and mastodon.social are huge on the fediverse. No one really runs interesting forks of mastodon. And the whole large flagship instance is a pretty consistent phenomenon (eg lemmy.world).
Perhaps we’ve just gotta learn how to do this better. But the hazard there is that it isn’t clear what’s worth doing and what isn’t. I and I think many are sceptical that the whole instance thing is worth it all the time.
Yeah, that’s definitely a problem. One reason I think is that now you are by default signed up for mastodon.social, which results in a huge mastodon.social.
Maybe. One can hope. In the end though, my impression of how the broad structure of the fediverse has panned out is that we really shouldn’t underestimate the tendency for people to centralise.
I also think that most people are so used to centralized services by now. Like, I’m not blaming them for being immature, but there is still a long way to go for people to become mature digital actors. That’s a big problem.
I hope that much of this will even itself out as the Fediverse grows. With Threads, soon there will be another big player in the Fediverse that will be the next center of it :D
My personal opinion is that
We need to get more people in the Fediverse
We need to educate people in the Fediverse towards more digital agency
If we get this done, the Fediverse grows heathily. But I think this will not happen necessarily with Threads joining. The people there are quite comfortable with their central services.
Instead, we should try to ally with the traditional communities of the web. I would be for Harry Potter fans, because they are themselves able to create their own spaces on the web, as they have managed to do for many years. There should be one or multiple Harry Potter-themed instances that attract H.P. fans and at the same time promote digital agency.
But as the Fediverse professionalizes, this will only get easier. At some point, network effect will kick in and you just want to be a part of that. Yes, you could just make a discord server, but with a little more effort, you make a fediverse instance, where you already have a huge potential of possible users.
The threat here could be of course, that this professionalization comes again with centralization, for example with a service like Wordpress, where you can easily setup your own Mastodon instance (not ideal). But I’m confident that the counter-culture in the Fediverse will work against that.
Maybe. One can hope. In the end though, my impression of how the broad structure of the fediverse has panned out is that we really shouldn’t underestimate the tendency for people to centralise.
Mastodon and mastodon.social are huge on the fediverse. No one really runs interesting forks of mastodon. And the whole large flagship instance is a pretty consistent phenomenon (eg lemmy.world).
Perhaps we’ve just gotta learn how to do this better. But the hazard there is that it isn’t clear what’s worth doing and what isn’t. I and I think many are sceptical that the whole instance thing is worth it all the time.
Yeah, that’s definitely a problem. One reason I think is that now you are by default signed up for mastodon.social, which results in a huge mastodon.social.
I also think that most people are so used to centralized services by now. Like, I’m not blaming them for being immature, but there is still a long way to go for people to become mature digital actors. That’s a big problem.
I hope that much of this will even itself out as the Fediverse grows. With Threads, soon there will be another big player in the Fediverse that will be the next center of it :D
My personal opinion is that
If we get this done, the Fediverse grows heathily. But I think this will not happen necessarily with Threads joining. The people there are quite comfortable with their central services.
Instead, we should try to ally with the traditional communities of the web. I would be for Harry Potter fans, because they are themselves able to create their own spaces on the web, as they have managed to do for many years. There should be one or multiple Harry Potter-themed instances that attract H.P. fans and at the same time promote digital agency.