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

@bcrypt @tim I have closed down registration on this instance to prevent this

@Gargron @tim i feel that was the right choice. i would like to run an instance but don't want the burden of maintaining it forever; giving users a migration strategy is a deal breaker for me running one

@bcrypt @tim @Gargron for me I would like to see a way to port follower-lists to other instances, I don't know if that's feasible but it would help being able to move and prevent supremacy of any one node

@sarahjeong @Gargron @bcrypt Working on it.

@tim @sarahjeong @Gargron @bcrypt Wait, working on it how?

@kevin_redacted @sarahjeong @Gargron @bcrypt

Quit my day-job as an IT manager 2 years ago to work on the topic of P2P identity & reputation. To get an idea, see: https://github.com/identifi/identifi

@tim Oh wow, cool. I wish I could afford to quit my day job and work on interesting projects.

Are you actively attempting to integrate this into Mastodon atm, or just talking long-term?

@kevin_redacted Working on a proposal that includes self-issuing identities, managing multiple identities, accurate tracking of accompanied reputation, controlling one’s social network(s), sharing sensitive data and/or personally identifiable information (PII), trolls, sock puppets, and Sybil swarms.

Give me a few more weeks and I'll drop it here first. :)

@kevin_redacted Oh, and there's also gonna be multi-sig, distributed (read: mobile) reputation, some P2P networking, strong crypto (for bothing signing messages and encrypting data), local data storage, and user- and/or machine-controlled sharing of (sensitive) data.

Should address heterogeneity, non-centralisation, micro-intermediation, pubkey namespace, WoT, JSON msgs, APIs, CLI, revocations, Sybil protection, DoS protection, etc.

@tim @kevin_redacted That sounds really cool. Do you happen to have anything written down about the technical design? I would love to read more about it.