Just checked out Mastodon and I didn't feel compelled to sign up.
I am sure it is fine but the network effect is lacking, it is not as if I need to go on there for any reason, don't know anyone on there.
What I was surprised at was that there was no blockchain nonsense going on with it, lurking away in the footer. That really would have turned me off it.
Mastodon dates from 2016. Depending on which aspects of blockchain, it lon postdates Bitcoin, and came up roughly in parallel with the blockchain-all-the-things idiocy.
If one thinks about it, a properly used social network also doesn't need proof-of-work, because it has social proof. If three people you trust have spent 2 years regularly liking posts from a fourth account you can be quite sure that fourth account is no fake.
Reasonably. Sybil attacks still happen with frequency.
I've also noted that creating a new account with little visible connection to another can also re-establish social connections fairly quickly. After getting booted off G+ at one point, (accessing the site via Tor), I decided to tweak the entire notion of a trusted identity (having already gone pseudonymous) by naming my new account "The Real Slim Shady". I managed to re-acquire most of my core 20-40 followers over a few days.
(Being able to corroborate the connection from other sites helped, though many people twigged on who TRSS was even before checking.)
I've also seen known users turn hostile in bad ways over time. Much as I've had the experience of knowing people who've ended up committing murder, or serious financial crimes. Vetting is a hard problem.
I signed up for mastodon to use for posting electronics projects and getting feedback. It's... more of a platform to talk at people rather than with people. I do not mind that my friends are not on it, and I'm almost glad my family and coworkers are not on it.
Mastodon is when you can't handle any one having an alternative option than you, so you log on to a twitter clone where you are the only person using it and are always right.
Beyond the fact that I don't really believe Wil is entirely innocent in his complaints, he simply had to change instances.
He also used his real name. In fact, he didn't really take any steps to protect himself besides moving to mastadon. Large instances, after all, simply function like an unmonetized twitter.
Well, I think most of that 'out of context' stuff like "all white men should be killed" and "smash all trump supporters" is probably pretty gray area, right?
>Diaspora tries to be a nonprofit Facebook. Is that correct?
Diaspora devs are a bit touchy about being referred to as a Facebook alternative, because it inevitably invites comparisons at a feature level, leading to disappointment. They've made it clear they do not aim to be a Facebook clone, and Diaspora will likely not have some features that Facebook has (no photo albums, no events, etc).
Both are federated platforms based on open protocols, capable of being self-hosted.
Feature-wise, Mastodon is a microblogging platform, defaulting to 500 characters per post, and supporting hashtags, images, and video, as well as lists and blocking/muting capabilities.
Diaspora (and the related Friendica and Hubzilla) are social-graph posting platforms, with Markdown-based formatted posts of significant length,[1] organised around Aspects (similar to G+ Circles),[2] and hashtag-based interest seaarch/streams. Images and video supported, multiple Notifications types.
Friendica and Hubzilla add groups and other features, as well as more robust blocking (a distinct weakness of Diaspora).
________________________________
Notes:
1. I seem to recall 100k characters mentioned, 16,700 words or so. Novella range. Possibly longer.
2. Google+ apparently took its early design from Diaspora, including its renamed 'Circles' and "Sparks" features.
I am not happy with these new services because they are all hosted in the EU where there is no right to free speech, so to me they are not an improvement over what they are supposed to replace.
You probably wan to look at Voat, then. It's the go-to home for white supremacists and people who really dislike fat people, but it provides you with a free-speech zone, if that's your thing.
There is no free speech in Germany, so chances are that someone will say something on Diaspora that the government of Germany won't like. Then, if the owner of Diaspora refuses to delete the "illegal" post, he will be thrown in jail, so he doesn't really have a chance not to censor whatever the government forces him to censor.
the fire one makes sense though. You're not neccessarily directly forbidden from shouting fire, you're forbidden from creating mass panic which can lead to injuries and death
What's up with the absurd absolutism? Absolute free speech does not exist anywhere in the world, including the US. That's not the same thing as "no free speech".
BTW, the decision you linked to is about Austria, not the EU. The ECHR merely held that Austria is allowed (not required) to ban certain kinds of speech. Other Council of Europe member states are free to permit them.
As a non-US and non-EU person, I can confidently say that the US has better free speech laws than anywhere else on this planet. I am open to being educated on this though.
The US only ranks 45th place on the Freedom of Press Index for instance, so it appears there are actually quite a few things not even the press is allowed to write about, much less your ordinary person.
Generally freedom of press is greater in areas where it matters. When the press can't speak about a thing, oftentimes your ordinary person can't either.
Treating freedom of speech as completely disjoint from freedom of press is wrong.
That is quite irrelevant. We're talking about freedom of speech here. Not the freedom of the press. When I think of freedom of speech, I have a simple question. If I say something that one finds offensive, am I committing a crime and will be prosecuted for my words? That's the only criteria I have. Now, the consequences that come from saying what you want, for eg. losing a job, or business - those have nothing to do with freedom of speech.
Obviously there are exceptions, in the form of breaking contracts. Can't go around leaking classified information or industrial secrets - contracts you agreed to when you signed up for the gig.
You can't even report on snowden revelations in the US without the government coming after you. I don't need to tell you to what lengths the US government went going after Snowden himself.
If you can't even exercise free speech where it really matters in regards to your democracy, you hardly have total freedom of speech.
Also Snowden is hardly the only example of whistleblowers from within a branch of a democratic government speaking out. However the US is an extreme outlier in how it handled the matter.
Another thing many western democracies manage to do without is an equivalent to the US's National Security Letters, which are also a form of the government policing speech where it might matter.
So apparently you have to be afraid to speak out when it really matters, but at least you can deny the holocaust I guess.
All places have some limits on free speech. EU places some exceptions, just like USA does, on the freedom of speech.
In the USA things like defamation, incitement to riot or lawless action, speech covered by copyright, terrorist threats etc. may land you in big trouble. In the EU same thing for for example holocaust denial. And in other places, such as for example Russia, the constitution might grant you the freedom of speech, but the system enforcing the constitution does not.
It is difficult to compare countries directly because of different laws and legislative systems. The use of some form of proxy metrics like the Freedom of Press Index might be useful, but then the question becomes which metrics should be used, and when presented with several metrics, there is a danger to select only those metrics which enforce existing viewpoints.
This is false. I personally know academics who study genocide who do serious research on the Holocaust in Europe.
It's just that these people are dingbats who have decided ahead of time to deny the Holocaust and desperately search for any shred of broken evidence for this claim.
No, most EU countries have laws in some form that prohibit Holocaust denial. But as with any country that has the rights to freedom of speech, these rights are inevitably balanced and restricted by other laws.
This is a good thing, because while freedom of speech is important, the general wellbeing of the population and preventing people getting hurt is important as well. It is my belief for example that allowing racist remark under the banner of free speech, hurts more than it helps. It leads to an overall negative impact in the wellbeing of the population. I think the same balance was considered when prohibiting holocaust denial.
> the general wellbeing of the population and preventing people getting hurt is important as well
I fail to see how speech does hurts anyone. Would you mind elaborating? Should it not be solely the responsibility of whoever hears said speech to decide on whether to act on it? Does censorship of any shape or form not actually hurt the ones that wanted to listen to said speech the most?
On the other side of the argument, I think many would ask where do you draw the line? And who draws that line? It seems like the majority of the people I know feel like it's better not to draw that line at all and instead focus on teaching people why these arguments are wrong. The failing of our education system is another (bad) problem entirely.
Ex: what if the government one day decides that criticizing the government is too offensive?
This is what I'm concerned about too. Where I'm from, offending those in power/religion/etc will get you into a whole lot of trouble. When I was young, maybe two decades ago, there was an inkling of hope that perhaps one day my people would follow the Western ideal(at least to an extent), when it comes to free of speech, human rights and so on.
Unfortunately, I don't see this happening anymore. I don't want to sound gloomy, but the web back in the day had a completely different feel to it. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I can feel it's vibrancy dying. Maybe it started a while ago.
Anyway, there's still hope with decentralization and such. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.
I'm aware of this. You may think it's a good thing, and I'm inclined to agree that for a peaceful and civilized society, this balance is definitely a necessity. However, there may be many amongst us who think it's not a good thing. I don't prefer one over another anyway, but just pointing out that absolute free speech isn't a thing anywhere. I suppose the US comes as close to it as possible. This is my regular HN account.
There's very little speech that's actually illegal in the US. You can't tell outright lies about someone with the intention of hurting them professionally (although it's still a civil matter, and when I say "lies", I mean specifics, e.g. you can't claim in an article that someone dropped out of college if they didn't) and you can't say anything that has a high probability of causing immediate physical harm (e.g. you can't order somebody to shoot someone). That's basically it. When you start talking about publishing photographs or recorded audio, things get a bit more complicated because of copyright laws, and obviously CP is illegal, but strictly in terms of speech, online or off, there are almost no restrictions here.
Are you allowed to slander in the US? Are you allowed to publish Child pronography? Are you allowed to publish Obscene materials (as judged by the average citizen)? Are you allowed to utter words that might incite someone to fight you? [1] Some of it depends on state law, but the 1st amendment does not protect any of those [1].
Bottom line: No country has absolute freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is one of the basic liberties, and it's balanced against others. Different countries come to different conclusions on the balance. Generally speaking Germany tends more towards Freedom than the US according to comprehensive surveys [2].
Specifically When it comes to denying history, citing the US Supreme Court: "[There is] no constitutional value in false statements of fact".
The Netherlands. And in what way is US freedom of speech with puritan censoring of anything sex related better than a system in which we prohibit something like holocaust denial? (something that actually hurts people, as opposed to someone's nipples)
Responding to the sibling re: censoring pornography. The 1st amendment prevents the government from interfering with the free exchange of ideas (among other things). We generally believe that letting the government regulate this kind of thing is a dangerous slippery slope.
There are myriads of other exceptions to 1st Amendment protections (including, even if people often don't think of it that way, intellectual property rights):
In greece you are not allowed to criticise the president, nor are you allowed to insult the church. In germany it was illegal (not sure if it still is) to publish games that had nazi imaginary (such as wolfenstein). In the UK and France you are not allowed to produce certain pornographic drawings. To me these restrictions show that in the EU there is no free speech.
>In germany it was illegal (not sure if it still is) to publish games that had nazi imaginary (such as wolfenstein).
Since that comes up from time to time...
In germany games with nazi imagery are as legal as books or movies containing nazi imagery. Legal through the art/science/research/teaching/reporting exception §86 StGB (3) [0]
What has recently changed is that the organization that does the age ratings for games changed its stance. Now they consider the exception rather than treating it as a show stopper.
Europe has a conditional right to free expression which is balanced with other rights:
"Article 10 – Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary"
Yes, that's a lot of caveats, but if you have a substantive true idea or non-extreme politics you're fine. What you're not free to do is make calls for genocide etc.
that's the bit I don't agree with. it leaves room for a lot of interpretation. there was a woman in Austria who was fined for saying that mohamed was a child rapist (which you could argue it is true given that he slept with underaged girls).
I don't agree to people being fined if they say something about Mohamed or God. That is not free speech IMO.
The most comprehensive survey on various freedoms in the World that I know of ranks Germany at 94, ahead of France at 90 and the US at 86. (100 is the perfect score)
Freedom of speech is also a guaranteed right in the German constitution, as it is in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
In every jurisdiction there are limits to the freedom of speech. This applies to the US as well as everywhere else:
Americans are often "horrified" at free speech in Germany because glorifying Nazis and terrorists is forbidden there (as in France and a handful other European countries).
My take is that this platform at least probably allows posting pictures with nipples, unlike most US-based services.
EDIT: As pointed out below, I probably misread the intent of the comment I was replying to as its exact opposite (because I thought the user was the same as GP). If so my apologies.
So you're saying a country that censors Nazis but not nudity has crazier stances on free speech than one that censors nudity but not Nazis?
Hmm, upon rereading I think you're right. You see, I had not noticed it was a different user from GP, which biased my interpretation of intent.
> Hard to say, though, with this internet text thingy.
Tell me about it. Poe's Law[0] is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to communication difficulties on the web, and with trolls (paid trolls even) and algorithms that favor imflammatory content for stronger virality and increased watch time it's getting worse.
Then again, that was exactly one of the main things that Adam Curtis was warning about in HyperNormalisation, and Clay Shirky in his work in general[1][2]. We're still coming to grips with this new medium of communication and haven't quite figured out adequate protective systems against abuse and exploitation yet.
> you're saying a country that censors Nazis but not nudity has crazier stances on free speech than one that censors nudity but not Nazis
No, I said the contrary. I am rather content with the state of free speech in France (and by extension, Germany, which is almost the same on this respect) because it fits very well my own view of how a tolerant society, respectful of its citizens, should behave.
Well US is in many ways slowly starting to look like Nazy germany in its beginings. I hope this turns around because i really dont want nuke war. But it seems germany atleast tries to do something and learn from the past. While US in its hard defense of indivilualism (its just illusion btw) is really loosing it. I mean some people in us gov now are literaly evil and want to harm others. Thats never a good sign.
How do you see individualism as a problem? Our courts have generally upheld free speech rights pretty rigorously, and we a have a pretty strong capitalist ethos, i.e., a right to property.
The worst symptoms of individualism, in my opinion, come mostly from a general American distaste for public programs, like, say, single-payer (government) health care.
Generally, I feel like America has the most problems with a representative democracy. Our winner-take-all system naturally leads to two parties, and public opinion doesn't actually influence policy. Money influences policy. I see that as the big problem, not individualism.
> A diaspora (/daɪˈæspərə/) is a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale. In particular, diaspora has come to refer to involuntary mass dispersions of a population from its indigenous territories, most notably the expulsion of Jews from Israel (known as the Jewish diaspora) and the fleeing of Greeks after the fall of Constantinople. Other examples are the African Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the southern Chinese or Indians during the coolie trade, the Irish during and after the Irish Famine, the Romani from India, the Italian diaspora, the exile and deportation of Circassians, and the emigration of Anglo-Saxon warriors and their families after the Norman Conquest of England.
I came for this comment. Seems like it was named after the act of people leaving other social networks, but what about if everyone really had left and was using Diaspora?
The most successful decentralized communication system - email as it turned out, people would concentrated to large free provider like Google. Decentralized server does not protect privacy for normal user because not most people could handle owning their server.
The most success decentralized service is BitTorrent. It is decentralized and it is decentralized in client level. Though it also caused uncontrollable piracy, since it is too easy to spread any data using Bittorrent. I think a true decentralized social network to protect privacy should be a p2p app, not server to server federation.
Maybe. But then there's a question of where does the content live? Most people don't have a desktop they leave connected all the time, and don't want to be hosting videos and photos off their mobile device.
So you're stuck with replicating that data out to all the peers, which means you've just lost control of "your" data again.
Sure but hosting content isn't free, so then you have the problem of paying for it. I could imagine a crypto-currency based solution but that is just sooo complicated.
Most of the reason for centralisation is simplification. Have you tried running your own email server lately?
Yes, cryptocurrencies was one way. (I don't think that it's really complicated.)
But on the other hand I don't think that it's really expensive. As in have a RasPi lying around at home that's keeping track of everything when you're not online. That should totally suffice for your own needs. If you have bigger needs or want to support the network (maybe even for a small compensation in whatever form) that's easily scaleable.
Or think of bittorrent: It's incentivised that you run contribute back what you received. That works totally without compensation in cryptocurrencies.
About the simplification I'm not sure either. Have you tried running Gmail lately? (Not as client but as service ^^ I think that it's not quite straight-forward.)
Once you have a proper working p2p network/algorithm/protocol I can imagine that it's easier to run for all parties.
> But then there's a question of where does the content live? Most people don't have a desktop they leave connected all the time
I think most people know someone who does and we can start there. The first step is to make it really easy to host on a desktop (including addressing and NAT busting, both of which Tor provide).
I fully agree.
The problem is that it's even harder to design something that is fully p2p than something federated.
(One thing that tries to be exactly what you want would be https://secushare.org/ But its in a very very early stage, right now. There exist others, though.)
And you have to agree that (even if most people choose the biggest provider) simply having the choice of different providers or even being your own provider is a huge improvement.
Peer to peer connections on web browsers are pretty good (assuming you have relays to get around router issues with shared IP addresses). And Javascript is generally fast enough for encryption (although I'm not sure what the random number generator situation is).
But we lack the ability to easily guarantee file contents, which makes delivering encryption software more suspect. Additionally, data storage is still very unreliable. It is difficult to share information seamlessly between multiple browsers without a server, storage limits vary between browsers, data can get deleted for weird reasons. I've advocated for a while that users probably should be able to grant pages separate read/write access to specific files and folders on disk, but that's obviously a tricky decision to make and implement.
The Same Origin Policy obviously comes with security benefits. But it also means that if you share a 3rd party link, there's no way to look up metadata about the link without a proxy server to bypass the policy. Building something like an RSS reader in purely clientside Javascript is impossible because you literally won't be able to request many of the RSS feeds.
It can be a little bit surprising when you dig into all of the theoretical stuff that's possible with clientside Javascript to discover exactly what the areas are where the web is behind native. They're usually not the parts that get the most attention.
Its not really about the design. At some point you have to recognize the physical impossibilities of p2p models - primarily availability. The reason why Matrix is more popular than Tox or why we haven't seen any remotely successful p2p social network while projects like Mastodon took off is because there is simply no way to make the UX of the scenario where you want to send a message to X, who is offline, and before they come online you go offline and the message is never sent.
The way Tox does it (and any network trying to work around this problem) is to locally cache messages en masse as close to the destitination as you can get. But as you can imagine that makes the bandwidth and power requirements of maintaining the network too streinuous to be competitive with a federated option that simply works when the always-on server is available or doesn't when its offline.
"Physical impossibilities of p2p models" - Although there might be structural limitations, I think they're not too strong.
Just because we currently do not have a major p2p network doesn't mean that it's not possible.
I think it's very possible to have something like this (even for availability). You just need to have a good design/mechanism.
But there's the problem (why we didn't see something like this yet): No one puts many resources into the design of p2p-stuff. The competing, central solutions get tons of resources from big companies that try to make money with it. There is no company that tries to build something p2p because with giving away the control, they give away the possibility to make money out of it.
Playing devils advocate here, but I also kind of believe this... There is no such thing as privacy in the social network. It is foolhardy to assume it is even possible. Even a real life social network relies on trust, trust that can be broken very easily and totally outside of your control. Maybe the answer is to accept that privacy isn't a real thing and stop sharing things, even in what you assume is a protected environment, that you don't wish to be public. I don't think there is a technical solution to "people can't keep secrets"
Technical solutions can't stop people you intended to share your secrets with from breaking your trust, but they can help prevent uninvolved third parties from getting direct access that no one intended to give them.
That’s an interesting point and I’m stealing it for in real life conversations, to point out the human element of secrets - but we should understand people are bad at keeping them while also not allowing Facebook to monitor messages to find a better way / leverage to sell us things.
No; the real life equivalent would be the the kid in class sitting between you and your friend opening the note and telling class what you said.
You asked the kid in class to pass the note. He did so freely. You assumed he wouldn't open the note, but guess what... he totally opened that note. And now he wants to profit off the information.
Not really. I've been using Mastodon for the last four months and I feel pretty safe. My instance doesn't know much more than I already told it. And I don't get reminders, emails telling me to check in, or ads following me. I could also run my own instance, and still be connected to the people I know.
Another example - Git. It's decentralized in principle, but in reality, people either centralize around GitHub and alternatives, and even when self-hosted, there is usually a notion of master repo.
That's partly a tooling issue, though. If git had native requests and a decent UI around them baked in, and the UI client also had some way of discovering your peers across networks, then the need for gitlab/github would be diminished.
Yeah no, unless you work on a project with 100 other people. Even if peer discovery, nat traversal and whatnot would be solved, what am I supposed to do if both my project members are currently offline? Synchronizing progress would be a nightmare in a three people project where everybody is located somewhere else. You could pretty much consider git peer to peer already, but everybody is too lazy to open their firewall and instead talks to the always-on supernode that is github.
Diminished. It's extremely common for teams to be online throughout the same business day. If you have an entirely async team where you can't coordinate time to exchange work product, then sure, you need an async third party location. That's by far the exception rather than the rule though.
Bittorrent is decentralized in theory, but I think nowadays it's not worth much without trackers. Trackers again enable centralized groups with self-serving interests to centralize the activities and track user activity.
Check out what gnutella or the dat-protocol have to offer for reasonable alternatives.
You might want to check out https://snake.li - It's a cryptography-based "social network" born out of a masters' degree thesis. AFAIR most of it works in the browser, while the server doesn't really know much about the data.
A nice idea that sadly didn't get enough funding, and their creators eventually moved on.
There are several Android clients, including Dandelion, found in the F-Droid repository. I think there's one in the Google Play store as well. No iOS clients, but the mobile site works quite nicely.
I have some former G+ friends who went to MeWe, some to Mastodon, and some to Twitter. I found Diaspora a pretty poor experience last time I was there, so I'm not really following the group that ended up there
My wife wasn't happy with the idea that friends of friends could see photos of her on Facebook and Facebook was regularly tweaking privacy settings (read: undoing my changes) so I punted and deleted my profile.
Frankly Google+'s circles seemed like the perfect solution by giving you explicit control over who sees what and further letting you tailor what you post to each circle.
Although I'm sorry to see it go at the end I only used G+ to keep in touch with fellow Ingress players. Between the fact that my Diaspora experience was similar to yours, slack is the go to for my tech interaction with k8s users and discord for gamers I'm not sure I really need another time waster anyway. I can't help but think some portion of the population will like me choose to replace Google+ with nothing at all.
I've taken myself off all social media (for a couple of years now) and feel better for it but do miss a bit of the social interaction with some of the groups I was a member of.
I have been tempted to start an anonymous (in as far as a made up name) Facebook profile to take part in those groups again but have resisted against it because one thing leads to another and you end up on the platform fully.
So for my tech interests, also using slack but I'd be keen to find some non-tech slack channels. They're a bit tricky to find.
If you look at https://joindiaspora.com/statistics, you'll actually notice that "Registrations" are "Closed". I guess that means that this specific "pod" is full and you need to find a different "pod"?
Diaspora has been a comedy of such errors for the decade it's existed
I think I had a Diaspora account in like 2011... Then they announced they were blowing away everyone's account to redesign the database or something... Never bothered with it again.
A more accurate way to put it is that to put together a good service, back-end engineering is critical but is only part of the story. Good UX is also critical to success, and that comes with a focus on the human needs, not just the technicalities of moving data around.
What I meant was engineers made it for engineers. Dumping the database to change functionality is not something a successful user oriented system would do - but is something enigneers calling the shots would do.
It's something amateur engineers would do. Professionals should be able to handle database restructuring without losing data. Yes, it's harder, but... come on.
If the system is being that radically altered that you can't migrate data, just call it v2.whatever.com.... or point the old one to legacy.whatever.com, and redirect people with messaging.
Not to defend Diaspora, but it's not exactly like this stuff doesn't happen in real companies.
To pick one example out of a hat, when Twitter bough Smyte, they shut down the API 30 minutes after announcing the acquisition[0], leaving vendors like NPM with no warning. After getting hammered by large companies in the press who depended on their services, their response was, "we could have done better and are learning from this experience."
From a customer perspective, there's not really any practical difference between a company deleting your account because the founders were just given a ton of money, and a company deleting your account because the founders are worried about database performance.
Actually, I bet you could find people that would like the idea of a social media platform that wipes your history or disassociates your account every January 1st. Like a musical chairs, but the chairs never get reused.
Nice idea but it would only work if there were no ties at all between it and your real world identity, no connections that knew who you really were, because the usual method of harming someone via old social media posts uses screenshots, not links. The Internet has radically changed since back in the day, you cannot assume good faith of anyone.
Yeah, but that's getting to the very crux of communication: trust. If you're not sharing information it's pointless to call whatever it is 'social'. Anonymity is the form of least trust and you could argue the highest form of honesty. There's a very thick veil of soap scum on the Facebook ecosystem. Only the dumbest of the very tech illiterate are themselves.
I wish I had been able to convince the guys to use a relational DB from the beginning instead of Mongo. Turns out a social network is full of relational data - but my buddies were too excited by new tech, and made a decision based on “cool”ness that hurt themselves in the long run.
However, it’s still impressive what four guys at the end of their college careers were able to build with no professional experience whatsoever. (Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day.)
I think the biggest missed opportunity here was that an advisor of my own suggested to me that they really should leverage SMTP and build a better experience on top of that. An advanced mail client with social network-style features and presentation, and an obfuscation of the “pod” concept (do users really care which one you’re on?) could have been a smash hit and could have had fallback design to allow non-network-members to still be included as leaf modes in the Diaspora social graph. I couldn’t wrap my head around any of this at the time, so they never heard even a whisper of the idea. My bad!
> Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day.
Funnily exactly that choice was what made me reject the request to help with development early on.
Not building on SMTP was a wise choice in hindsight, given that it turned into a pretty monopolized protocol since then - most people have a hard time to get their mails delivered from a private server nowadays.
That’s too bad. Their situation was that they were working in Pivotal’s office, surrounded by extremely high quality Rails devs who were happy to give free help and advice.
Like I said, the EM loop never worked, and instead of spending weeks banging their heads on it, Rails allowed them to move forward onto their actual problem, instead of having to invent everything themselves.
I guess I don’t know that much about SMTP still :)
Diaspora and Google+ and App.net really prove that funding and tech influencer press isn't enough to make a successful social network. Social networks are harder than they look.
It's funny because we also saw a slight increase in the pace of account creation on Movim as well https://movim.eu/, but I'm not sure if there is a real correlation.
But I'm really happy to see that more and more people are joining federated solutions better than proprietary centralized ones like Google+ :)
I was quite surprised after studying your main page that movim looks much more like a chat app than a social network. How comes you advertise it as social network? And assuming it is in fact a social network, what brought you to use the XMPP standard for that?
I'm assuming your use of the word "dozens" is a joke, but if not, Diaspora can handle it very well. Their population doubled after Cambridge Analytica hit the news - and within a month or so they lost all those new users: https://nerdpol.ch/posts/e8532ca04b2f013617bf52540061b601
Let's see if they can hold on to the current batch. Diaspora is actually quite usable and stable. I haven't dealt with any issues since I began using it. The docs and non-existent API suck, though.
The Pluspora pod has seen 6,700 members joining, virtually all since 8 October, with numerous others at other pods. I've long had a JoinDiaspora account myself, and revived that.
This compares with 2,900+ members of the G+ Mass Migration community on G+, also since 8 October. (I am one of the mods.) The Change.org petition to retain G+ has seen 31,000+ signatures.
I'd previously conducted assessments of publicly visible G+ posting activity, and arrived at an estimate of 5-10 million such profiles, from a population at the time of about 2.2 billion registered profiles (from a time when Android & Gmail registrations defaulted to registering for G+). Stone Temple Consulting expanded on that research and methodology:
Google have never been forthcoming with statistics on actual on-G+ activity, though a solid core of single-digit millions, with an extended engagement of 30-120 million, as of March 2015, seems likely.
Other platforms, particularly MeWe, are reporting tens of thousands of new accounts from G+ refugees (Reddit AMA).
The thing that Diaspora and Mastodon get wrong is their insistence on putting the instance in the username.
If I'm jim1234@mastodon.org because somebody else gets my preferred username, that's fine. I don't have to worry about the @somehost.somewhere site shutting down because the host got bored or lost their job or moved. So jim1234@somehost.somewhere is the last thing I want.
Whatsapp started with the idea of $1/year for an account. If I'm paying $1/year to mastodon.org so I don't have to worry about reinventing the people I follow, etc. that seems like a good deal.
Then instances can compete on features and/or price. If my friend Bob is running a server for his friends for free, maybe I use him. Or if instance A has spam-filtering while instance B accepts absolutely all federations and instance C translates everything into pirate-speak, well, I can pick from those.
If Bob's system is down a lot or he doesn't do spam-filtering or whatever, it'd be nice to have the option to pay $10/year or $25/year or whatever to be on another instance where it's a business relationship. Or maybe the instance does fund-raising twice a year because the site owner wants it less businesslike.
Running the central registry becomes a big responsibility but it also lends itself well to being replicated. And at some point 100,000 or 1 million users becomes $100,000 or $1,000,000 in actual revenue. Minus credit card processing, colo fees, etc. But still, there's a business there.
Centralized user names would also mean a single point of failure and authority which would defeat the main idea behind federation. It doesn't even solve the problem of owning you identifier as it is still externally controlled.
Censorship, surveillance even de-platforming are all back in the game then.
I've been using mewe for a year now and it has a really nice tech community. Great privacy focus too. Its nice that communities like these are able to sustain themselves lately
196 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadMy naive impression is that Mastodon is a decentralized Twitter clone and Diaspora tries to be a nonprofit Facebook. Is that correct?
Basically, a decentraliced "Facebook like" app.
I am sure it is fine but the network effect is lacking, it is not as if I need to go on there for any reason, don't know anyone on there.
What I was surprised at was that there was no blockchain nonsense going on with it, lurking away in the footer. That really would have turned me off it.
Mastodon itself has no reliance on blockchain.
I've also noted that creating a new account with little visible connection to another can also re-establish social connections fairly quickly. After getting booted off G+ at one point, (accessing the site via Tor), I decided to tweak the entire notion of a trusted identity (having already gone pseudonymous) by naming my new account "The Real Slim Shady". I managed to re-acquire most of my core 20-40 followers over a few days.
(Being able to corroborate the connection from other sites helped, though many people twigged on who TRSS was even before checking.)
I've also seen known users turn hostile in bad ways over time. Much as I've had the experience of knowing people who've ended up committing murder, or serious financial crimes. Vetting is a hard problem.
http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...
He also used his real name. In fact, he didn't really take any steps to protect himself besides moving to mastadon. Large instances, after all, simply function like an unmonetized twitter.
I kind of think that's the point for a celebrity on Twitter or a similar site.
Diaspora devs are a bit touchy about being referred to as a Facebook alternative, because it inevitably invites comparisons at a feature level, leading to disappointment. They've made it clear they do not aim to be a Facebook clone, and Diaspora will likely not have some features that Facebook has (no photo albums, no events, etc).
Feature-wise, Mastodon is a microblogging platform, defaulting to 500 characters per post, and supporting hashtags, images, and video, as well as lists and blocking/muting capabilities.
Diaspora (and the related Friendica and Hubzilla) are social-graph posting platforms, with Markdown-based formatted posts of significant length,[1] organised around Aspects (similar to G+ Circles),[2] and hashtag-based interest seaarch/streams. Images and video supported, multiple Notifications types.
Friendica and Hubzilla add groups and other features, as well as more robust blocking (a distinct weakness of Diaspora).
________________________________
Notes:
1. I seem to recall 100k characters mentioned, 16,700 words or so. Novella range. Possibly longer.
2. Google+ apparently took its early design from Diaspora, including its renamed 'Circles' and "Sparks" features.
Edit: I guess it's horrible, since the owner is based in Germany. Ouch.
I live in Berlin and we have the most vibrant community of privacy, security etc I've ever seen.
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
And don't get me started on the puritanism
You might want to read Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
There is no practical right to free speech in the EU, this happened a few weeks ago: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6316567/Woman-corre...
BTW, the decision you linked to is about Austria, not the EU. The ECHR merely held that Austria is allowed (not required) to ban certain kinds of speech. Other Council of Europe member states are free to permit them.
Surely not the US? Right?
https://rsf.org/en/ranking
Treating freedom of speech as completely disjoint from freedom of press is wrong.
Obviously there are exceptions, in the form of breaking contracts. Can't go around leaking classified information or industrial secrets - contracts you agreed to when you signed up for the gig.
If you can't even exercise free speech where it really matters in regards to your democracy, you hardly have total freedom of speech.
Also Snowden is hardly the only example of whistleblowers from within a branch of a democratic government speaking out. However the US is an extreme outlier in how it handled the matter.
Another thing many western democracies manage to do without is an equivalent to the US's National Security Letters, which are also a form of the government policing speech where it might matter.
So apparently you have to be afraid to speak out when it really matters, but at least you can deny the holocaust I guess.
In the USA things like defamation, incitement to riot or lawless action, speech covered by copyright, terrorist threats etc. may land you in big trouble. In the EU same thing for for example holocaust denial. And in other places, such as for example Russia, the constitution might grant you the freedom of speech, but the system enforcing the constitution does not.
It is difficult to compare countries directly because of different laws and legislative systems. The use of some form of proxy metrics like the Freedom of Press Index might be useful, but then the question becomes which metrics should be used, and when presented with several metrics, there is a danger to select only those metrics which enforce existing viewpoints.
Yes, there is. At least in my experience as a happy EU citizen.
So want to cut the hyperbole and substantiate your claim?
You'd have to go with something like "show that the massive decline in the Jewish population of Nazi Germany was by means other than genocide".
Which is also impossible, but due to truth instead of poor epistemology.
It's just that these people are dingbats who have decided ahead of time to deny the Holocaust and desperately search for any shred of broken evidence for this claim.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/20/austria.thefar...
This is a good thing, because while freedom of speech is important, the general wellbeing of the population and preventing people getting hurt is important as well. It is my belief for example that allowing racist remark under the banner of free speech, hurts more than it helps. It leads to an overall negative impact in the wellbeing of the population. I think the same balance was considered when prohibiting holocaust denial.
Question: why use a throwaway account?
I fail to see how speech does hurts anyone. Would you mind elaborating? Should it not be solely the responsibility of whoever hears said speech to decide on whether to act on it? Does censorship of any shape or form not actually hurt the ones that wanted to listen to said speech the most?
Ex: what if the government one day decides that criticizing the government is too offensive?
Unfortunately, I don't see this happening anymore. I don't want to sound gloomy, but the web back in the day had a completely different feel to it. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I can feel it's vibrancy dying. Maybe it started a while ago.
Anyway, there's still hope with decentralization and such. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.
It's an image of itself that the US likes to project though.
Bottom line: No country has absolute freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is one of the basic liberties, and it's balanced against others. Different countries come to different conclusions on the balance. Generally speaking Germany tends more towards Freedom than the US according to comprehensive surveys [2].
Specifically When it comes to denying history, citing the US Supreme Court: "[There is] no constitutional value in false statements of fact".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
[2] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2018-table-cou...
Free Speech, in the USAmerican sense, seems to be strongly curtailed in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California
There are myriads of other exceptions to 1st Amendment protections (including, even if people often don't think of it that way, intellectual property rights):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
The whole idea that "Free speech is protected in the US but not in Europe" is just an (libertarian?) meme with no basis in fact.
You do see the flawed reasoning, don't you?
Since that comes up from time to time...
In germany games with nazi imagery are as legal as books or movies containing nazi imagery. Legal through the art/science/research/teaching/reporting exception §86 StGB (3) [0]
What has recently changed is that the organization that does the age ratings for games changed its stance. Now they consider the exception rather than treating it as a show stopper.
[0] https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/86.html
If you're happy with the status-quo, you're hardly a good test for your society's freedom of speech, no?
Freedom of speech means the freedom to say unpopular things.
"Article 10 – Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary"
Yes, that's a lot of caveats, but if you have a substantive true idea or non-extreme politics you're fine. What you're not free to do is make calls for genocide etc.
that's the bit I don't agree with. it leaves room for a lot of interpretation. there was a woman in Austria who was fined for saying that mohamed was a child rapist (which you could argue it is true given that he slept with underaged girls).
I don't agree to people being fined if they say something about Mohamed or God. That is not free speech IMO.
There is no free speech in the EU.
It doesn't matter, Diaspora is decentralized. You can host your own instance. You can enter an instance _living_ in your country of choice.
The most comprehensive survey on various freedoms in the World that I know of ranks Germany at 94, ahead of France at 90 and the US at 86. (100 is the perfect score)
Freedom of speech is also a guaranteed right in the German constitution, as it is in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
In every jurisdiction there are limits to the freedom of speech. This applies to the US as well as everywhere else:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Americans are often "horrified" at free speech in Germany because glorifying Nazis and terrorists is forbidden there (as in France and a handful other European countries).
My take is that this platform at least probably allows posting pictures with nipples, unlike most US-based services.
So you're saying a country that censors Nazis but not nudity has crazier stances on free speech than one that censors nudity but not Nazis?
Ever heard of the paradox of tolerance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I don't think he said that, just the opposite. I don't think he was being sarcastic. Hard to say, though, with this internet text thingy.
> Hard to say, though, with this internet text thingy.
Tell me about it. Poe's Law[0] is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to communication difficulties on the web, and with trolls (paid trolls even) and algorithms that favor imflammatory content for stronger virality and increased watch time it's getting worse.
Then again, that was exactly one of the main things that Adam Curtis was warning about in HyperNormalisation, and Clay Shirky in his work in general[1][2]. We're still coming to grips with this new medium of communication and haven't quite figured out adequate protective systems against abuse and exploitation yet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_...
No, I said the contrary. I am rather content with the state of free speech in France (and by extension, Germany, which is almost the same on this respect) because it fits very well my own view of how a tolerant society, respectful of its citizens, should behave.
Well US is in many ways slowly starting to look like Nazy germany in its beginings. I hope this turns around because i really dont want nuke war. But it seems germany atleast tries to do something and learn from the past. While US in its hard defense of indivilualism (its just illusion btw) is really loosing it. I mean some people in us gov now are literaly evil and want to harm others. Thats never a good sign.
> escalates further.
"... it could be more on fire."
Now? Wow. That is incredibly naive.
The worst symptoms of individualism, in my opinion, come mostly from a general American distaste for public programs, like, say, single-payer (government) health care.
Generally, I feel like America has the most problems with a representative democracy. Our winner-take-all system naturally leads to two parties, and public opinion doesn't actually influence policy. Money influences policy. I see that as the big problem, not individualism.
> A diaspora (/daɪˈæspərə/) is a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale. In particular, diaspora has come to refer to involuntary mass dispersions of a population from its indigenous territories, most notably the expulsion of Jews from Israel (known as the Jewish diaspora) and the fleeing of Greeks after the fall of Constantinople. Other examples are the African Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the southern Chinese or Indians during the coolie trade, the Irish during and after the Irish Famine, the Romani from India, the Italian diaspora, the exile and deportation of Circassians, and the emigration of Anglo-Saxon warriors and their families after the Norman Conquest of England.
Currently I am using MeWe which is not federated etc. but is close enough to G+ (also, most of the communities I was following on G+ are there).
As expected, "normal people" who were apathetically following me on G+ like friends etc. (I refuse to use FB) have bern less than thrilled.
I suspect that Diaspora would have not improved the situation, but maybe I am wrong.
The most success decentralized service is BitTorrent. It is decentralized and it is decentralized in client level. Though it also caused uncontrollable piracy, since it is too easy to spread any data using Bittorrent. I think a true decentralized social network to protect privacy should be a p2p app, not server to server federation.
So you're stuck with replicating that data out to all the peers, which means you've just lost control of "your" data again.
Most of the reason for centralisation is simplification. Have you tried running your own email server lately?
Shoehorning in cryptocurrency just seems absurd.
But on the other hand I don't think that it's really expensive. As in have a RasPi lying around at home that's keeping track of everything when you're not online. That should totally suffice for your own needs. If you have bigger needs or want to support the network (maybe even for a small compensation in whatever form) that's easily scaleable. Or think of bittorrent: It's incentivised that you run contribute back what you received. That works totally without compensation in cryptocurrencies.
About the simplification I'm not sure either. Have you tried running Gmail lately? (Not as client but as service ^^ I think that it's not quite straight-forward.) Once you have a proper working p2p network/algorithm/protocol I can imagine that it's easier to run for all parties.
I think most people know someone who does and we can start there. The first step is to make it really easy to host on a desktop (including addressing and NAT busting, both of which Tor provide).
Peer to peer connections on web browsers are pretty good (assuming you have relays to get around router issues with shared IP addresses). And Javascript is generally fast enough for encryption (although I'm not sure what the random number generator situation is).
But we lack the ability to easily guarantee file contents, which makes delivering encryption software more suspect. Additionally, data storage is still very unreliable. It is difficult to share information seamlessly between multiple browsers without a server, storage limits vary between browsers, data can get deleted for weird reasons. I've advocated for a while that users probably should be able to grant pages separate read/write access to specific files and folders on disk, but that's obviously a tricky decision to make and implement.
The Same Origin Policy obviously comes with security benefits. But it also means that if you share a 3rd party link, there's no way to look up metadata about the link without a proxy server to bypass the policy. Building something like an RSS reader in purely clientside Javascript is impossible because you literally won't be able to request many of the RSS feeds.
It can be a little bit surprising when you dig into all of the theoretical stuff that's possible with clientside Javascript to discover exactly what the areas are where the web is behind native. They're usually not the parts that get the most attention.
The way Tox does it (and any network trying to work around this problem) is to locally cache messages en masse as close to the destitination as you can get. But as you can imagine that makes the bandwidth and power requirements of maintaining the network too streinuous to be competitive with a federated option that simply works when the always-on server is available or doesn't when its offline.
But there's the problem (why we didn't see something like this yet): No one puts many resources into the design of p2p-stuff. The competing, central solutions get tons of resources from big companies that try to make money with it. There is no company that tries to build something p2p because with giving away the control, they give away the possibility to make money out of it.
A working example of offline storage would be bitmessage (although I think It won't scale). A much more interesting development would be lake: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8974-practical_mix_network_desig...
You asked the kid in class to pass the note. He did so freely. You assumed he wouldn't open the note, but guess what... he totally opened that note. And now he wants to profit off the information.
Mastodon is pretty cool.
Check out what gnutella or the dat-protocol have to offer for reasonable alternatives.
A nice idea that sadly didn't get enough funding, and their creators eventually moved on.
It's AGPL though.
Frankly Google+'s circles seemed like the perfect solution by giving you explicit control over who sees what and further letting you tailor what you post to each circle.
Although I'm sorry to see it go at the end I only used G+ to keep in touch with fellow Ingress players. Between the fact that my Diaspora experience was similar to yours, slack is the go to for my tech interaction with k8s users and discord for gamers I'm not sure I really need another time waster anyway. I can't help but think some portion of the population will like me choose to replace Google+ with nothing at all.
I have been tempted to start an anonymous (in as far as a made up name) Facebook profile to take part in those groups again but have resisted against it because one thing leads to another and you end up on the platform fully.
So for my tech interests, also using slack but I'd be keen to find some non-tech slack channels. They're a bit tricky to find.
Here is a tool to view info about pods: https://podupti.me/
On theis diaspora wiki page, the GIANT sign up link will direct you to a random pod: https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Choosing_a_pod
I think I had a Diaspora account in like 2011... Then they announced they were blowing away everyone's account to redesign the database or something... Never bothered with it again.
A more accurate way to put it is that to put together a good service, back-end engineering is critical but is only part of the story. Good UX is also critical to success, and that comes with a focus on the human needs, not just the technicalities of moving data around.
If the system is being that radically altered that you can't migrate data, just call it v2.whatever.com.... or point the old one to legacy.whatever.com, and redirect people with messaging.
Before this thread I would've exclaimed "That's unheard of!".
Imagine suggesting something like that at a real company.
To pick one example out of a hat, when Twitter bough Smyte, they shut down the API 30 minutes after announcing the acquisition[0], leaving vendors like NPM with no warning. After getting hammered by large companies in the press who depended on their services, their response was, "we could have done better and are learning from this experience."
From a customer perspective, there's not really any practical difference between a company deleting your account because the founders were just given a ton of money, and a company deleting your account because the founders are worried about database performance.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/twitter-smytes-customers/
The customers get screwed in either case, but the reason people are incredulous about Diaspora's DB wipe is because it's the company screwing itself.
However, it’s still impressive what four guys at the end of their college careers were able to build with no professional experience whatsoever. (Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day.)
I think the biggest missed opportunity here was that an advisor of my own suggested to me that they really should leverage SMTP and build a better experience on top of that. An advanced mail client with social network-style features and presentation, and an obfuscation of the “pod” concept (do users really care which one you’re on?) could have been a smash hit and could have had fallback design to allow non-network-members to still be included as leaf modes in the Diaspora social graph. I couldn’t wrap my head around any of this at the time, so they never heard even a whisper of the idea. My bad!
Funnily exactly that choice was what made me reject the request to help with development early on.
Not building on SMTP was a wise choice in hindsight, given that it turned into a pretty monopolized protocol since then - most people have a hard time to get their mails delivered from a private server nowadays.
Like I said, the EM loop never worked, and instead of spending weeks banging their heads on it, Rails allowed them to move forward onto their actual problem, instead of having to invent everything themselves.
I guess I don’t know that much about SMTP still :)
https://podupti.me
Specifically the pod wizard (2nd green button, upper left).
But I'm really happy to see that more and more people are joining federated solutions better than proprietary centralized ones like Google+ :)
Let's see if they can hold on to the current batch. Diaspora is actually quite usable and stable. I haven't dealt with any issues since I began using it. The docs and non-existent API suck, though.
This compares with 2,900+ members of the G+ Mass Migration community on G+, also since 8 October. (I am one of the mods.) The Change.org petition to retain G+ has seen 31,000+ signatures.
I'd previously conducted assessments of publicly visible G+ posting activity, and arrived at an estimate of 5-10 million such profiles, from a population at the time of about 2.2 billion registered profiles (from a time when Android & Gmail registrations defaulted to registering for G+). Stone Temple Consulting expanded on that research and methodology:
https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on...
Google have never been forthcoming with statistics on actual on-G+ activity, though a solid core of single-digit millions, with an extended engagement of 30-120 million, as of March 2015, seems likely.
Other platforms, particularly MeWe, are reporting tens of thousands of new accounts from G+ refugees (Reddit AMA).
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9sq3jf/im_mark_weinst...
Comparison of many distributed (and some even decentralized) social networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_pro...
If I'm jim1234@mastodon.org because somebody else gets my preferred username, that's fine. I don't have to worry about the @somehost.somewhere site shutting down because the host got bored or lost their job or moved. So jim1234@somehost.somewhere is the last thing I want.
Whatsapp started with the idea of $1/year for an account. If I'm paying $1/year to mastodon.org so I don't have to worry about reinventing the people I follow, etc. that seems like a good deal.
Then instances can compete on features and/or price. If my friend Bob is running a server for his friends for free, maybe I use him. Or if instance A has spam-filtering while instance B accepts absolutely all federations and instance C translates everything into pirate-speak, well, I can pick from those.
If Bob's system is down a lot or he doesn't do spam-filtering or whatever, it'd be nice to have the option to pay $10/year or $25/year or whatever to be on another instance where it's a business relationship. Or maybe the instance does fund-raising twice a year because the site owner wants it less businesslike.
Running the central registry becomes a big responsibility but it also lends itself well to being replicated. And at some point 100,000 or 1 million users becomes $100,000 or $1,000,000 in actual revenue. Minus credit card processing, colo fees, etc. But still, there's a business there.
Censorship, surveillance even de-platforming are all back in the game then.