Thinking About Mastodon

While selfhosting email in the low-level sense of your own VPS and installing your own mail server software is frustrating today, I find this is relatively rare. More common (besides personal Fastmail/Hotmail/Gmail) is to own your own domain but pay a webhost. E.g. Fastmail or Google Workspace with custom domain, or a webhost like Hover, Gandi, Squarespace, GoDaddy, etc.

This benefits from a larger-scale spam filter, whilst also having complete autonomy over who uses it and what they use it for, plus the ability to transparently move providers if you wish, plus the freedom to pick your email client (eg. Thunderbird with full and offline copy of your data), plus it has resulted in thousands of large domestic webhosts around the globe, not a handful of international ones only.

It's not as decentralised as everyone managing their own software packages on a Rasberry Pi buried in their backyard, but it certainly allows anyone to do that if they want...

To draw the analogy with Mastodon, I could see us avoiding having only a few big Mastodon sites plus some self-hosted ActivityPub sites if we lean into the web hosting model. There are already major players like Masto.host, who could eg. offer centralised anti-spam measures in the future.

Anti-spam could also be decoupled from hosting, such as the case with blogs. E.g. you can self-host WordPress, or choose a professional WordPress hoster. The later is still orders of magnitudes more decentralised than everyone on WordPress.com, and anti-spam can be offered by the hoster, or through a plugin like Akismet that contacts a differerent shared service for that of your choosing.

Mastodon already supports relays and webhooks that are being used to share block lists between like-minded instances, allowing you to be closely integrated with a community (including populating eachothers federated timeline) whilst still being hosted separately.

It sure would be awesome if Lightcone Infrastructure spun up a Mastodon instance for the extended rationalist/EA/AI safety communities.

I don't use twitter or mastodon, and have clearly misunderstood. I thought that the point was you only saw things from people you were following, or maybe things people you follow shared from other people they follow? Presumably this is not right, because if it was you would just not follow any spam-bots.

One thing I have been giving thought as well is that at the end of the day there is a still a central point of authority in any given instance. Which brings with it other issues such as possible liability in regards to content moderation as well the financial commitment. I think Mastodon federation only solves half the problem and the second half could be solved with a DAO as its underlying governance structure where the users themselves vote to agree on moderation rules as well as funding the operations of the instance.

I considered self-hosting, but an email server is already more complex than I want to manage and a Mastodon server is much more so.

I have no affiliation here, but there's lots of places like masto.host where you can pay to host your own instance. Sure, someone running your VM might do something awful. But... that's cloud hosting. 

I will vouch for the admin of linuxrocks.online, been on their for years (and other than some unfortunate downtime), it's been solid (in the drama-free sense). 

I signed up for social.lol via omg.lol, because they charge a membership fee which gives some (perhaps misguided) assurance of longevity / effortful spam fighting vs a free-for-all server funded by someone's altruism.

Social networks are normally very sticky

I think this is selection bias.  SUCCESSFUL social networks are very sticky.  Startup or trial social networks, however, generally just fail.  I don't know that Twitter's recent changes will change very much about how people use existing social networks - it may shift some to whatsapp/tiktok/whatever, or even discord servers or the like for small-scale interactions.  I suspect Twitter usage will stay mostly in-place once things settle a bit.  I doubt a newcomer will move into that niche.

Does anyone have a good reason to see why mastodon or some subset of mastodon servers will actually work?  The distributed nature means it's nearly impossible to curate any part of it - I can't see how it implements any sort of equilibrium between spam-hell, forgery-hell, and cant-find-anything-good-hell.