social.masto.land is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Development server for getting Radio3 and other apps to work with Mastodon.

Server stats:

1
active users

xndr
Public

@dave a sign of something meaningful + big happening

Brewster Kahle
Public

@dave

How can we support Mastodon, as a community, so its tech stays resilient to the inevitable challenges ahead?

I morn the fate of usenet and email. oh, and RSS.

David Hopeward
Public

@brewsterkahle @dave Someone very wisely recently pointed out to me that podcasts are remaining open and uncontrolled by corporate interests because they use humble old RSS to distribute their feed. A now massive podcasting ‘industry’ relies on that small, open bit of tech.

Dave Winer ☕
Public

@hopeward @brewsterkahle @dave

imho it's because the expectation of user choice was set from the beginning.

antipode77
Public

@brewsterkahle @dave

For all 3 of them news of their demise is greatly exagerrated.

The Ferridge
Quiet public

@antipode77
@brewsterkahle @dave

I agree. RSS, at least, died only a death of popularity. It otherwise works as well as ever

Diane
Public

@brewsterkahle @dave

I'm missing the days of blogs that didn't require logging in to read.

Diane
Public

@brewsterkahle @dave

For me I get the following (trimmed a bit). I might guess it defaults to checking your google account, and most people are logged into google.

Sergi
Quiet public

@alienghic @brewsterkahle @dave same for me, can't read it without signing up with some service.

eudoxos
Public

@alienghic @brewsterkahle @dave Wipe medium.com cookies and you will see the whole article (they are used as access counter, I guess, and beyond some number, you need to log in)

Diane
Public

@eudoxos @brewsterkahle @dave

Thanks for the suggestion. That worked great.

Nelson Calvinho
Public

@brewsterkahle @alienghic @dave excellent read that mirrors exactly how I feel about Mastodon

Max Mustermann
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@brewsterkahle @dave RSS is still in use everywhere. Even youtube still has it. What actually happened was google killing the most popular feed reader.
Dave Winer's linkblog in Masto
Public

@brewsterkahle

brewster -- what a thrill to hear from you!

it's all about interop, between people and software.

if people see the benefit of USING mastodon, it could become as popular as all the tech you mention.

and personally I've been building on RSS all of this year, because i thought something like this moment was coming. ;-)

Dave Winer's linkblog in Masto
Public

@brewsterkahle

scripting.com/2022/12/24/16294

We'll know it's working if most people feel their best place to write is their blog, where the editing tools work just as they like them to, and there are no boundaries to where those ideas can be published.

Scripting NewsTo get back in the zoneIt's even worse than it appears..
ChrisQ
Public

@brewsterkahle @dave Why do I have to edit where I post? That seems a little reductive. Can you tell me more about why that’s good?

kleks
Public

@dave Do you remember when some time ago, a Finnish youngster with a name of Linus decided to wire an OS? Same story. No one owns it, it is maintained by teams, etc etc.

Colin Fry
Public

@kleks @dave At least after churning out decades of “The Year Of Linux On The Desktop” articles, tech journalists might have more luck with a “The Year Of Mastodon On The Socials” article :)

quixote
Public

@colinfry666 @kleks @dave Funny that at the time there were no articles predicting linux would outlast the desktop 😆

Eva Pavlikova
Public

@dave brilliantly good points. Thanks for sharing👍

Toxy 🔬🇪🇺🇸🇪🇬🇧🇺🇦
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@dave Great article. Thank you.

"Extinct" Mastodon
Public

@dave an AI seems to have written this

Max Mustermann
Public
@dave Before I forget:

> This may change, of course — I worry that if Mastodon gets big enough, for-profit companies may stomp in somehow. But at the moment, it feels refreshingly different.

Pawoo is already a thing and ran by Pixiv, a for profit company.
GNU/r000t
Quiet public

@dave
>Eugen Rochko, who seems to be the opposite of the standard megalomaniacal tech founder.
:ekkolul:
@maxmustermann

mangeurdenuage
Public
@dave
>npc gets freedom
>doesn't know what to do :sadge:
simple
Quiet public

@dave
When will the free and open source communities stop the _wishful thinking_ that the majority of people will *finally* choose "values over usability" ? How many more decades are needed to get over this harmful mindset?
@aral

Dave Winer's linkblog in Masto
Quiet public

@simple @aral

we don't need everyone to do it, just enough people to sustain a growing base of usable software.

simple
Quiet public

@dave @aral

Been following FOSS culture for almost 15 years. What u said was always the mantra.
During this time FB, Google and Twitter took over the world. So maybe the mantra should be changed.

The values should definitely brought up with every occasion, but strategizing based on the idea that "enough" people will choose "values over usability", is not realistic and even worse, it's self-defeating.

Dave Winer's linkblog in Masto
Quiet public

@simple @aral

i don't debate in social media, so good luck with that. ;-)

Dynom
Public

@dave right now, Mastodon isn't sustainable. People are losing money on it. The donation situation won't last and frankly i don't think it's fair.

I read familiarities in the post, but I also think it misses the mark. There is just less to write about, which isn't something uncomfortable, there is just fewer information value. And frankly a lot is written about Mastodon, although lots of parroting, as usual.

Mastodon isn't done inventing itself, which is good. Means we re-witness inception.

cedricdes
Public

@dynom @dave what if sefhosting an instance became common practice and most people would have a raspberry pi at home runing their instance, and maybe inviting family members and neighbors to join. I have no experience runing an instance so far

Mario Torre
Public

@cedricdes @dynom @dave i don’t think this is very sustainable either, it looks like it requires a massive amount of disk space to cache content across instances, even for single user instances. And not everyone will have the necessary skills to run their own hone servers, let alone safely.

Dynom
Public

@cedricdes @dave running it securely and staying current with patches will be an issue. Regardless, people need to maintain and pay the electricity bill.

Operational effort often scales pretty well. Few large is much more efficient over many small. Especially here with Mastodon due to how the content moves around.

I think we'll end up seeing a small group of large Mastodon clusters, with a premium model to pay the specialists keeping it all safe.

But the there is are still the legal issues.

Sergi
Quiet public

@dynom @dave isn't the "money losing" happening mostly to instances that decided to go for popularity instead of sustainability?

They could have decided to cap the number of users for more controlled costs (in addition to helping to a more decentralized network).

Dynom
Quiet public

@sergi @dave it still costs money and without compensation the entire network is losing money and therefore is unsustainable.

Either it needs to be (state-) funded (without influence, thats virtually undoable), or should have a premium tier that also compensates for free accounts (a bit what @protonvpn does).

As long as instances are run mostly on goodwill, it'll be fragile.

Peter Brown
Public

@dynom @dave following 14 with four followers it’s not surprising you’re finding things a bit thin. Even with 300 followers, I am still only 10% of my Twitter following and things are taking a long time to get back to where they were. 
But they will.
And as we build our followed and following numbers, so the liveliness of the timeline will increase. All we can do meantime is increase the numbers and boost relentlessly.

Peter Butler
Public

@dave I have a bias, but I have not seen much of this:

>> Gotta love tech journalists who describe Mastodon as “that impossible-to-use website.”

There were a few stories like that in early November maybe, but that’s not the impression I’ve gotten since from mainstream news orgs.

That seems like a bit of a strawman.

Sir Dr Rusty o the Isle 🖤💛❤️
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@dave too much tech journalism is driven by the same forces that want Birdland to survive, #Greed, #Power, #Control #Commercialism
For many its the only world they've known.
When we worked on #ARPANet in the 1970s the audience was limited and the rules were basically simple and enforceable. The focus was on the technology, not on the culture and management issues. I was probably one of the few social scientists on the system in 1970 and we weren't having to worry about bad actors on #ARPANet but our buildings were under threat by bombmakers similar to what happened at U of Wisconsin.
We almost certainly underestimated the potential of bad actors.

Sir Dr Rusty o the Isle 🖤💛❤️
Public
Greengordon
Public

@dave

Maybe the problem is that most journalists these days write for right-wing rags. Maybe they understand Mastodon all too well.

"Gotta love tech journalists who describe Mastodon as “that impossible-to-use website.” First of all, it’s an app. C’mon. Second of all, aren’t these the same people who write breathless explainers about the wonder of cryptocurrencies, which are not only impossible to understand but literally built from bullshit?"