> On decentralized systems in particular I encourage you to read Moxie's take on web3 which outlines the challenges of this much better than I ever could
I am sad that the crypto/defi/web3 crowd hijacked the term "decentralized" and now people who should know better equate the two.
Web is decentralized. E-mail is decentralized. The internet is decentralized.
> Mastodon encourages not just decentralization, but federation. [...] I will make the point that this is the root of the issue here.
Ok, so we're actually talking about federation being bad, not decentralization as such.
> I used to host a pastebin for a few years. It was Open Source and with that others also hosted it. I had to shut it down after it became (by a small percentage of users) used to host illegal content. [...] I really hard a hard few weeks when I first discovered what my software ended up being used for.
We take that risk every time we open source something or run an internet service. I would not be surprised if some criminals somewhere used Flask for nefarious purposes. That doesn't mean Flask and his other software is not, on net, a huge benfit for society. This issue is orthogonal with (de)centralization, tho.
> Imagine you're a rather small server and suddenly Eli Lilly and Company joins your instance.
Let me rephrase that to show what a straw man this is: Imagine you're a rather small email server and suddenly Eli Lilly and Company starts hosting their mail on your instance
The chance of that happening is precisely zero. WTH would they do that (and why would you let'em)? The same argument goes for Mastodon.
Turning to the title of the post, Scaling Mastodon is Impossible, I agree with the author (to the extent that I know about Mastodon, anyways). Maybe Mastodon isn't up to the task, maybe ActivityPub as a protocol is inadequate, but those are technical challenges to overcome. I don't believe this dooms the entire "decentralized federated network" concept.
> Wikipedia for all it's faults shows quite well that a centralized thing can exist with the right model behind it. [...] A “Not Twitter Foundation” that runs an installation of an Open Source implementation of a scalable micro blogging platform
This is an interesting proposal. I worry that the cost structure - in terms of hard work, not server capacity - is way different. For all its edit wars, the basic principle on Wikipedia that someone (or a group) authors an article and thousands or millions people read it. Once the article is written, it is (for the most part) static. "NotTwitter" is the opposite - you have constant stream of new content that needs to be policed (if you don't want your town square to descend into madness). Reddit's army of moderators shows how difficult that task can be.
[Meta: was the article flagged? It's got a fair number of points but is way down in the list of articles]
I am sad that the crypto/defi/web3 crowd hijacked the term "decentralized" and now people who should know better equate the two.
Web is decentralized. E-mail is decentralized. The internet is decentralized.
> Mastodon encourages not just decentralization, but federation. [...] I will make the point that this is the root of the issue here.
Ok, so we're actually talking about federation being bad, not decentralization as such.
> I used to host a pastebin for a few years. It was Open Source and with that others also hosted it. I had to shut it down after it became (by a small percentage of users) used to host illegal content. [...] I really hard a hard few weeks when I first discovered what my software ended up being used for.
We take that risk every time we open source something or run an internet service. I would not be surprised if some criminals somewhere used Flask for nefarious purposes. That doesn't mean Flask and his other software is not, on net, a huge benfit for society. This issue is orthogonal with (de)centralization, tho.
> Imagine you're a rather small server and suddenly Eli Lilly and Company joins your instance.
Let me rephrase that to show what a straw man this is: Imagine you're a rather small email server and suddenly Eli Lilly and Company starts hosting their mail on your instance
The chance of that happening is precisely zero. WTH would they do that (and why would you let'em)? The same argument goes for Mastodon.
Turning to the title of the post, Scaling Mastodon is Impossible, I agree with the author (to the extent that I know about Mastodon, anyways). Maybe Mastodon isn't up to the task, maybe ActivityPub as a protocol is inadequate, but those are technical challenges to overcome. I don't believe this dooms the entire "decentralized federated network" concept.
> Wikipedia for all it's faults shows quite well that a centralized thing can exist with the right model behind it. [...] A “Not Twitter Foundation” that runs an installation of an Open Source implementation of a scalable micro blogging platform
This is an interesting proposal. I worry that the cost structure - in terms of hard work, not server capacity - is way different. For all its edit wars, the basic principle on Wikipedia that someone (or a group) authors an article and thousands or millions people read it. Once the article is written, it is (for the most part) static. "NotTwitter" is the opposite - you have constant stream of new content that needs to be policed (if you don't want your town square to descend into madness). Reddit's army of moderators shows how difficult that task can be.
[Meta: was the article flagged? It's got a fair number of points but is way down in the list of articles]