YouSaid · the spoken record

Eugen Rochko

lines on the record: 100
first: 2023-07-25
most recent: 2023-07-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I can just, you know, if I start talking about it now, if I start describing the history of the, you know, and the positions that people have on this feature, but I'll keep myself short and I'll say we have a public roadmap on our website and quote posts are under the exploring section of that roadmap.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To remember where our original box was probably DigitalOcean actually. We've tried using a scaleway. Then eventually we moved to Hetzner, the German hosting company where we are right now. But basically it grew out of a single box into basically a cluster of 15 or 20 different machines manually managed by me. And right now we're upgrading to using Kubernetes. And that simplifies a lot of the scaling significantly from where it would take half a day to set up a new machine. It's like, okay, it's a couple clicks, a couple of keyboard button presses, and the capacity for a lot more traffic than you had before. So in that sense, plus having a DevOps person on the case, it will hopefully improve the speed by a lot.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think so. That would normally be not a software problem, but an infrastructure problem, something specific to Masternode.social. And honestly, depending on when you access it, it could have been a DDoS attack because that happened. Just last night I was looking into a traffic spike, seven times higher traffic than usual that was causing a lot of errors to appear. So, you know, if you're complaining about slowness, it could be that. And I would be happy to report that we are upgrading our infrastructure completely from what we were using before. Our infrastructure for Mastodon Social, it basically grew Out from a single box originally in 2016. We moved providers, well, I say we. Back then it was just me. I moved providers quite a few times during seven years.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're only going to link to a place if we think that people are going to be safe there and they're going to have a good time. And if your server is allowing everything and all types of language that is completely inappropriate, then they're not going to be safe there and we're not going to send them there. So there's”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is no real application for us to link to anybody, really. Sometimes, yeah, I get people very upset with me for not giving them a free link from our official website. But we're not really obligated to provide a link to anyone. We just do it to make the signing up process easier for end users.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a spectrum, but I think for the most part the majority of the servers that run Mastodon today have agreed on a certain set of rules, probably because a lot of them have been inspired by Mastod Social and our rules originally. So there is a lot of overlap. Some are a bit more restrictive about specific things like for example content warnings or the kind of self-promotion that you can do, whether you can run an account as a company, as a brand versus as a natural person, that sort of thing. Sometimes people get restricted with it. You know, obviously there is a side to the fediverse that is completely on the opposite side towards permissive and everything goes free speech, everything. For the most part, it is ostracized. From the Previous side, so there's a lot of different approaches exist out there.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you look across the spectrum of Mastodon instances, do you actually see a diversity of rules? Do you see that, okay, there's a spectrum and we have the most permissive sites and the least permissive sites?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like people overestimate sometimes the burden, the amount of reports, the amount of moderation necessary that comes with a specific server size, with a specific amount of users. Because most people don't regularly break the rules. It is still a minority of people who do that, a minority of cases where it happens. And it only increases when you have lots of new people coming in and possibly if you have like a troll army that decided to make a bunch of accounts that can make the numbers go up. But otherwise, it's been quite manageable so far, really.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's based on my experience running Mastronaut Social and the moderation loads that we get. I mean, most of the reports that come to us are usually about people who have just signed up and they're people that don't belong here. Like the people who don't. Actually, agree with our rules and who break them straight away. And during times when we had closed registrations, the load on our moderation team was a lot, a lot lower. Because for the most part, it's quite straightforward, really. The people who break rules, they show themselves very quickly, they get banned. And then there's nobody left to break the rules, right?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Servers that do run publicly and then accept registrations from the public, yes, moderation comes at a cost. Now, of course, as I mentioned before, the cost of moderation and the burden of moderation is shared across the entire network, and it is a lot lower than if a single company was doing it for millions and billions of users, right? If all you have to manage is a community of, let's say, even 5,000 people unless you have a lot of churn, which means if you have a lot of new people joining all the time, for the most part, the people that you have on your server will be well behaved because the bad ones will already have broken the rules and be suspended, you know?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it comes with all of the costs and problems and risks of running a public service like that. Now, if you run it just for yourself because you're an author, you're a blogger, you're a publisher, if you just want to an enthusiast and you want to consume content from other people on your own terms, it's a completely different model because no, you're not really liable for anything. It's just for yourself. You're not really risking much. And it doesn't cost a lot. And you don't need to think about moderating or hiring moderators or whatever for the”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, to address the Financial Times. I think they made the fundamental mistake of trying to run a public server instead of just running a server for their own journalists and people who work for the Financial Times because the moderation load, even the technical investment required is completely different for these models. And I'm not going to recommend everyone to start a public mastodon server and just start accepting registrations from the public and get like thousands and thousands of users because it is a huge responsibility. It is a responsibility. It comes with a cost. It comes with potential liabilities. It's not easy. But is it easy to start a social network from scratch? No, it is not. It is absolutely not. Imagine starting something like Twitter completely from scratch. Mastron is what allows you to do that if you want to do it. It's a shortcut to starting your own Twitter for the public if you want.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That community is just like fully out of control right now. But you can see, okay, I start a server. It gets moderately popular and suddenly as an administrator, my costs both in money, in time, in legal fees, whatever it is, just start to skyrocket in a nonlinear way to my user base or my activity or my financial return. Is there a way for you at the protocol level, at the governance level, to bring that back in line? Or is that, well, someone's going to have to figure out how to monetize this to make those costs work out?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two specific mastodon examples, right? The Financial Times, I think, started a Mastodon instance and shut it down within days saying, okay, just the legal compliance costs of running this server are too high for us. And the other one that was much funnier than that, I think it was a Harry Potter server shut itself down because there was an argument about Harry Potter and the community got out of control. And there's like, there's a”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I agree with you. I think content moderation is the most complicated part of operating a social network. My thesis is that it is fundamentally the product, right? In a way that any mask on instance with its different set of content moderation rules is only distinguished from the next Mastodon server because it has slightly different rules or a slightly different community, right? And that community might self-enforce those rules. What I'm curious about is moderation is the cost, right? Even beyond server costs or whatever, moderation and legal compliance as your community scales becomes a cost that is almost unbearable except for the largest companies in the world. So Facebook has to run moderation services across the world. They have to be in legal compliance across the world. Right now, as we speak, there is a Supreme Court case being heard about Section 230 and Google's recommendation algorithm on YouTube. I don't know how that's going to go.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“System of moderation, if for whatever reason you get blocked by a server of like 20 people, right? Well, that's part of it. Just imagine you were blocked by 20 people for writing that issue. Now, I'm not saying that everything is perfect because, for example, I think that there needs to be more transparency for users about what is happening with moderation on their servers. And then suddenly you lose a bunch of followers without knowing about it. I think that we need to build some kind of notification system into it that will tell you, okay, your admin has made the decision to block this server. You've lost this amount of followers. You disagree with this, here's what you can do as long as you have that, then people can again move to a better server, start their own, nobody really suffers, right?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I would say that content moderation is one of the hardest problems in social media. There's no denying that. We can add features, we can remove features, we can improve how a button looks or whatever. Condom moderation is always going to be at the core and center of what makes social media platform work. So yeah, it is complicated. But to counter your point, if you publish something about some hot button issue that a lot of people will disagree with, they might not see it even if you have a centralized service where everything is allowed because they'll block you because they'll filter out the word because they'll use a block list that they've made themselves and share around. That sort of thing is not unique to the federers and to the decentralized.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it's harder to know what is going to happen because there are so many fragmented rules as opposed to, I'm just mad at YouTube all the time because YouTube is too opaque. Like I'm wondering if you see a balance there that actually results in something different. Right? Because right now I think the frustration most people have is they don't know what's going to happen.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But this leads to challenges, right? Because what you want is a megaphone, right? When you're a writer on medium and you write the thing and you post it to the medium Mastodon instance, you're not trying to get to 20 other medium writers. You're hopefully trying to address millions of people who follow you across mast instances. And they all might have different rules. And if you write about some hot button issue that breaks a bunch of rules, you won't actually reach all those people. But those communities also have to moderate themselves. And so you kind of end up at a place where”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you have 20 people and one moderator, that's a much higher ratio of users to moderators than on any other commercial social media platform, right? And this decreases the moderation burden for everybody because for the most part people take care of the rule breakers on their own servers and then the other moderator doesn't have to deal with it.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So going from that point back to moderation, this decentralized system also allows to share some of the load of the moderation burden between completely different systems and completely different organizations, right? If you count a person running a server as basically a moderator, then the lower bound of the number of moderators in the federal verse is something like over 9,000 or 10,000 because that's the number of servers that there are. And of course, you know, for the single person servers out there, it doesn't really matter because they're just, you know, as I said, they're not really moderating. They're just running their own personal platform. But for all these communities,”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just want to point out that this is a hypothesis that has never been tested, right? That if you give people a choice of moderation regimes, that they will pick one that offers the most safety and they won't pick one that has the horribleness. Because right now everything is so centralized. So this is like a large scale test to see if the sort of market-based. Version of content moderation actually succeeds the way people have always said it would.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in that sense, we've been lucky to answer your question on automation, we have avoided automation so far because we believe in the personal approach. And what allows this personal approach is the decentralization and the different size constraints, right? First of all, back in regards to the rules, right? It is actually quite liberating in a sense to have this decentralized network because you can say, okay, these are the rules of the service that we offer and if you're not okay with it That's fine because you can go somewhere else where what you want is allowed, or you can just run it your own. We don't have any obligation to allow you to post this or that if you can just do it yourself on your own money, right?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that we were lucky enough that due to our smaller size, we haven't had to deal with the kind of horribleness that, let's say, Facebook moderators have to deal with. Honestly, most of our reports are either just generic spam or people being mean to each other. It's not the horrible stuff that Facebook moderators need therapy for.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you grow, this is the challenge, though. Small. Things get out of control very quickly, right? And people start doing very bad things very quickly. We have written about the challenges that moderators face on skilled social platforms for years now. Is that a set of challenges that you're facing where people are doing the worst possible things with your service? Do you have automated tools? How does that work for you?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't say that there are any issues with the rules that we have right now, that we have identified. For the most part, our users are happy and our moderation load is bearable. We have a bunch of paid moderators working on our server and as it grows, it will expand further and further, obviously. I mean, the moderation team, but in the sense of rules, I think it's quite fair to keep them as they are. They are on the safe side of the gradient between permissive and safe, but not too restrictive. And I think it's a good balance that we've stricken over the experience of, well, seven, seven years of running that server.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask those questions because I never really hear people ask you the questions. I hear people ask what the next set of things, which is content moderation. But I feel like you can't quite understand the content moderation aspect of Mastodon without understanding the governance of the protocol. But now I have to talk about content moderation. The point of this, as far as I can tell, is that you don't think one person should be in charge of content moderation. So, anybody can start a server that can impose any rules they want. Some of those rules can be very strict. Some of them can be very permissive. There's no central place to impose rules from your perspective.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there's that. And as far as I know, it's just full of spam and people talking about cryptocurrencies. The stuff that pops up, but activity pop is a very promising technology. No protocol is perfect and can never be perfect. That is important to be acknowledged because you will never be able to make ActivityPub 2 that will not have some issue that somebody will find and be like, okay, we need Activity Pub 3, right? So acknowledging that you might come around to the conclusion that, okay, activity Pub is here. A bunch of people are using it. A lot of people are using it. We'll stick to it and we'll make it better. And you can make it better because you can extend it. It's a technology that can be extended. There are these basic concept, basic semantics, but if there's something that doesn't map onto those semantics, you can add them progressively on top of it for new features, for new concepts. And then other people that interoperate with you.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what speaks in favor of activity pub and Mastodon is that we have built up this network, we have built up some momentum and some network effects for this protocol, which means that it's not really in anybody's interest to start completely from scratch. Of course, it doesn't stop everyone. There's that Jack Dorsey's pet project blue sky, which they have analyzed all the different decentralized social media projects and then decided to come up with their own completely separate from everything that came before again.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of them, there's another one called PeerTube, which is one where you have channels and you publish long form videos on them. And again, you can just follow a channel on PeerTube from your Mastodon account and get those videos in your home feed. And you can leave comments. And then those comments appear on the videos because a reply on something like Mastodon, which could be compared to Twitter, really maps well onto a comment on a video like on YouTube, you know?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blogging is just concerned with photos. But you can follow a pixel fed user from your mastodon account and vice versa. And then in your home feed on Mastodon, you get all these photos that people on PixelFed post. And on PixelFed, you get all the photos that a Mastodon user posts. It maps back onto each other not always 100% and it doesn't have to. Because as you say, it's so versatile. It doesn't always make sense if there is a new platform that does something very, very unique that would have no way of mapping onto what Macedon is doing today. They would not have to share any space, but there might be another platform that is kind of similar to that one, and they would be able to interoperate using that same semantics, right? There's a variety of these platforms on the fediverse. And PixelFed and Maston are just...”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would argue that this has already happened, but not quite the way that you've described it. In the programmatic way, right? And in the programmatic way, an Instagram photo maps onto the same structures as a video on YouTube or a post on Twitter, right? You can map these concepts onto very generic concepts and add all the necessary metadata as extra on top. Now, Mastodon is a product built on top of this protocol that focuses on short microblogs on short posts with videos or images attached or polls where people follow each other. But there already are other Fedaverse projects that focus on different aspects of the social experience, like PixelFed, which is focused entirely on photos, right? It's a photo app. It isn't not really concerned with short form.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Versatile. That's a good word for it. In the way that Instagram is sort of incompatible with a tweet from the jump, like they're just not the same thing or a TikTok is not compatible with a Facebook post from the jump. And you can see how much work Facebook internally has had to do to retrofit something that looks like TikTok onto Facebook. Activity Pub is just more versatile than that. The posts can be long. They can contain multimode media pictures and text, whatever it is. Do you think that someone might fork it and make it more specific? Because those are the social platforms that tend to win, right? The ones that kind of funnel everybody towards a particular format that captures the zeitgeist. And I'm specifically thinking of, if you talk about Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to Instagram to TikTok, the funnel has been now just point of camera at your face and go. And you're kind of back at, well, actually writing is the nap.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instead of being locked in into one commercial service, you would be allowed to leave and to build your own platforms and do something better without fighting against the network effects of a locked in commercial platform. So I see it as a good development no matter what. When more platforms are announcing support. Because it means that the network, the metaphors becomes more useful for everybody. If we create a future where a whole bunch of social networks are interoperable based on ActivityPub, it's a great future. Even if, you know, ideally also open source and everything, but even without that, it would still be a better situation for the web than is right now.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that Twitter with an underlying open source protocol, and okay, open source doesn't really factor into the protocol bit, Twitter based on an open protocol. Be a good thing, even in its current state, because you would be able to follow the people that you care about and be followed back by them without engaging with the actual platform”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, those companies that are announcing support for ActivityPub, which is the underlying protocol from Mastodon. So we had automatic CEO Matt Wellenwegg come on. He said Activity Pub is great. Fundamentally, this is all blogging. My whole company is blogging, whether it's Tumblr or WordPress.com or whatever. We're going to support this and be in full support of blogging. We talked to Mitchell Baker from Mozilla. She said Mastodon is really interesting. This is where I'm pointed. First, we're just going to set up an instance and see how it works. But you can see the turn there for her is building some activity pub support directly into the browser itself. Do you worry that, okay, here's a lot of attention from big companies. They're just going to spin up their own massive instances or tumblr will become a sort of strange new default activity pub source and we'll just kind of end up back at Twitter, but with an underlying open source protocol.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mastodon. I think it's very exciting that Tumblr has announced ActivityPop support, that Flickr has expressed interest in it. I was very happy when Vivaldi, the browser, announced their own Mastodon server and Mozilla has announced the same and Medium. extremely exciting.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies are eager to start building on top of the fediverse because for the first time in history, it's an ecosystem where one company cannot just pull the rug from under them by closing the APIs because it's open source, it's built on open protocols. So the API literally cannot be locked down in the way that Twitter is doing right now or has promised to do. The developers from tab bots build their ivory app, the premium paid iOS app for Mastodon, they know for sure that I am not going to pull the rug from under them and they will not lose their existence. And I welcome apps like that. I welcome apps being built on top of the Mastodon API. I welcome other software being built on top of the activity protocol that integrates with”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a diversity of business models in the Fediverse would be a good thing. I think different people exploring different ways to do stuff on this ecosystem would benefit everyone. Because the good business models would fail and the good ones would thrive, hopefully. At the end of the day, I think it's good to be able to support these different business models. And I think”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I realize I keep asking about money, but one of the reasons I keep asking about money is that if you want this to be a success on the scale of success you're talking about, it actually needs to become an ecosystem, right? There need to be multiple kinds of business models and businesses using the protocol, using Mastodon, inventing new ways of going. That's what makes it resilient to change in a way that MySpace's business was not resilient to change. Are you open to that to saying, okay, some people are going to monetize this thing in a way that maybe I personally don't like or that I'm ideologically opposed to, but in order for the ecosystem to thrive, lots of people have to be trying lots of different things.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard to say if the cost will be too much, and it's equally hard to say if there will ever be a point where some kind of monetization is absolutely necessary. One thing that I've looked into as part of our software offering, as part of the Mastodon software somewhere down the line, is a way for admins to basically monetize account creation, basically to offer paid accounts, like a premium email service would do. I think that's a very fair way to monetize. But right now people manage to do with Patreon and basically an honor system, you just codify it into the software. You say, okay, I pay you this amount per month. And for that, I receive an account and good quality of service. And that makes sense to me. I can't say for sure if we ourselves will ever make use of something like that. And it's hard to.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tworks and what they can do with it. That is the idea. The idea is the funnel, right? They get started on Mastodon Social, but afterwards they can move to an account on their own server that they create or on a different server provided by a different company or a different person, right? And historically, it has been the case. A lot of people who are currently running their own servers or even have started their own public service that they offer, they had their first account on Mastod Social. So it is working and it does make Mastod Social someone disproportionately large, I imagine, in the future, but Just part of making it work, I think.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For reference right now, Mastanocial isn't actually the default in our app. It's just one of the top ones that shows up. However, I think that possibly going forward, we might rework the onboarding user experience into presenting a default option as well as an advanced option where all of that stuff was choosing a server would be basically hidden away from those people who get scared by choice, right? who get intimidated by choice. But yes, you are correct in that it gets us closer to the Gma situation. But it's kind of unavoidable with the constraints of the problem that I've described where the choice is too complicated and you need to convince people that this is better and that this is something they should invest some time into and then they'll realize both how”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, literally, the number one criticism I hear from people is well, you have to pick a server and it'll never work because no one wants to pick a server. Okay, you're going to solve that problem. But now, aren't you getting closer to that collapse between the open protocol and the user experience where people think Mastodon, they download the Mastodon app and they end up on the Mastodon server?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the Gmail comparison is really interesting here. I cannot believe I'm about to explain Gmail to the decoder audience, but I'm going to do it just so I have said it out loud. Email is an open protocol that is run by standards organization. Gmail runs on those protocols, SMTP and IMAP and the rest. And so does Outlook or whatever. The reality for most people is that there's a collapse between the protocol and the application on their phone. Right. So if you have Outlook, you are almost certainly not using the Gmail app. If you have Gmail, you're almost certainly not using the Outlook app. You're going to the service and putting that app on your phone. The only real exception to this rule is like the Apple Mail app on the iPhone. Everything else is kind of, there's a collapse between the protocol and how it's expressed to the user. Mastodon.social, that's the one you run. You download the official Mastodon app. It's going to default you into it because defaults are important.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's what I've realized over the years. And the idea right now is to keep registrations open and continue having them open to the best of our ability. The only situation where I think we would maybe in the future close sign up temporarily is if there is technical issues that affect quality of service. Because priority for us has always been if lots of new people are joining and the servers are melting down is ensure that the people who are using our server now can continue to do so and have good quality of service if that means closing signups and directing people elsewhere then so be it but with the way that we're expanding the company getting dedicated DevOps person and so on and with the you know the new funds that we got I think we will be able to keep registrations open going forward”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But unlike with Twitter, you have the option to just take your account and go somewhere else or start your own and still participate in the network. So the power of somebody like Elan in the Fediverse is greatly diminished. So that's the strength of it. But to realize the strength, you need to be basically into the idea already. And for that, we need a simple conversion, you know, a simple sign up that people can grow through without too much hassle, without being presented with a completely different way to do things where they go and they say, oh, it's too complicated. I can't choose.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For having a default, right? I'm sure you realize when people are used to just going on a website and creating an account, presenting them with a choice of hundreds of different servers all provided by different people and organizations that they don't know, it's quite a paradigm shift. It's quite difficult for people to grasp on first sight. And I think it's something, really it is a strength of the platform that there is such a diversity of offerings instead of on Twitter you just have Elon Musk and if he decides to do X, there's nothing you can do about it. On Mastodon, in some ways you still have the potential for a mini Elon, right?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An example of that is email and the situation with Gmail. Gmail is huge and they have very good spam filters but unfortunately those good spam filters sometimes catch people who try to self-host email and it creates a situation where it's so difficult to self-host email you're basically forced to just go use Gmail or one of the other large providers instead and that's the kind of situation we ideally want to avoid in Mastodon and in the Fediverse which is the name for the for the network that Mastodon is basically part of based on this activity protocol so to avoid that and and so for that reason you know historically we've been trying to promote a healthy distribution of people across these different servers now what I've learned however over the years is that there is no replacement”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the past, it's been a huge burden, especially when I was working alone, to wrestle with the scaling problems or the technical issues of running a large-scale server. At the same time as running a company and writing code. That's just one side of it. The other side is ideological. Ideologically speaking, Mastodon is a decentralized social network, right? We don't want to promote a single node more than other ones. The ideal system is one where there's a whole bunch of different servers and they're roughly the same size and it doesn't matter which one you use, they're all interconnected, right? Because when you get to a situation where one single node is much, much bigger than all the other ones, the problem is that it gets disproportionate power to change things, to enforce its own whims.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT