hypothesis: if too many early users sign up on mastodon.social instead of other instances, federation will end up becoming a second-class feature. (imagine what email today would look like if gmail had existed in the 90s.)
other instances need to be able to compete with mastodon.social for growth, or https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 should be implemented.
@bcrypt Federation will never be 2nd class feature for me.
@Gargron @bcrypt I think that "too many users" is subjective (apart from scaling). If anyone thinks there are too many users around here, or too many douches, they can either move one, or run their own instance. This way, putting more pressure on any system, could help to balance the power over the federation as a whole.
Thoughts?
@tim @Gargron i am reminded of https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours as an example of too-many-users-on-one-node-of-a-supposedly-federated-system
@Gargron @tim @bcrypt
Hopefully symbolism like this will help pre-bake the culture into one that might avoid that trap.
I feel like this is a race to see who can run the largest instance so they can get advertising $$$ somehow :(
If we can get something like the Patreon model that @five talked about it might sidestep the incentive feedback loop further. I wonder if there are any easy to use decentralized server providers that can get fed money from shared cryptocoin wallet.