As someone who's had a single-user Mastodon instance for two years now: I love it. It's definitely not for everyone, for reasons mainly stated in the article. However, if you like a more personal, highly-curated federated timeline, a single-user instance is great.
I 90% use Mastodon to keep up with my friends' posts and see art and animal pictures (and I hate interacting with strangers LOL), so I curate my instance to only subscribe to them. For the remaining 10%, I have a secondary account on a larger instance for when I want to read the news etc. It's worked well for me, but again, it's surely not for everyone!
The only complaint on this list that, I think, is a legitimate complaint is replies not loading. Imagine if Lemmy worked that way. The rest is just how it's intended to work.
Certainly a good warning before trying to self host but this isn't broken.
The first populates the replies of the home timeline posts you see (as well as profiles of people it finds in those replies) and the second pulls down all the content from instances you select for your followed hashtags (choose mastodon.social and you can guarantee you'll see most all posts with those tags)
It can also be an awesome idea, depending on your perspective. Having an instance without all the cruft is a pristine peaceful thing at times. For a while I ran one of those subscriber bots on Lemmy and pretty quickly found it to be so full of shitposting spam as to be unusable. Just don't start an instance and expect it to be a raging party and you won't find it disappointing.
I agree with this take, and recently I actually read this article that criticizes how server centric fedi is as a whole. If it's hard and expensive for a layperson to self host, but you need to have an account associated with a specific server, then you're going to end up with a system where you're under the whims of a instance owner still. Not to mention the whole pick a server step severely hurts our adoption rates.
I like the idea of having an account just being a public and private key pair. Theoretically you could make one client side, use it to sign your messages, and servers could verify the signature and distribute your post without needing to have an explicit account for you. You could send every message to a random instance and it'd still work. You wouldn't have to worry about links to the "wrong instance" and you wouldn't have to attach your identity to a instance that might shut down or be bought by a bad person. The server would be essentially irrelevant.
I align with that article 's conclusion; in fact such a "fediverse browser" is exactly what I think the fediverse needs to fully replace closed/proprietary/traditional social media.
However, some of their arguments seem off. For example, for the client to be able to choose/implement it's own sorting algorithm, it seems to me that it would need to have access to all posts. At that point, your client is just another server, with all the problems that we're originally trying to avoid.
I have the same problem with your proposal / nostr's approach: you may obtain a portable identity but all the "content" tied to that identity still has to live somewhere - someone else's server or your own.
Yeah, I disagree with that part as well. I think it's fine for servers to store the content and provide endpoints for specific queries/sorts, and expecting the clients to have all the posts is a tad extreme.
In this case, yes the data needs to live somewhere, but that's the nature of having data be retrievable.
Nostr does some interesting things! What I mentioned here is actually just the identity part of what I think could be a significantly improved version of the fediverse. I have ideas on how to support subreddit style communities and decentralized moderation and things like that that make the whole idea a bit different from nostr.
I suspect retrofitting a whole new identity system to Fediverse will never happen because server admins, or instance admins, will come up with all kinds of reasons why they don't like the idea of not knowing who their users are. Some of them would probably allow it, but I bet a whole bunch of them wouldn't, and we'd get into this fragmentation where some servers won't allow posts from those types of identity, etc. It seems to me much easier to take Nostr and just give it the functionality you get inside the Fediverse.
Interesting to note that this was originally posted a little over a year ago. I don't know if anything has changed since, as I don't self host masto and have been spending more and more of my "fedi-time" here in lemmy.
Not surprised that someone who "led AI and subscription products at Amazon for the past 8 years" ended up back on mastodon.social, but that's probably neither here nor there...
Your article is a pretty reasonable and fair evaluation of farcaster, but then your post saying crypto/web3 is "mostly really dumb and bad" is not very nuanced. I know a lot of people on Lemmy don't like crypto, and that's what's in the meta right now, but if you are going to give something a fair shake, give it a fair shake, don't just anticipate backlash for covering a crypto topic and preface it with "it's mostly really dumb and bad". Ya there are a lot of scams, and a lot of bullshit projects, but there is a core of really useful infrastructure there, which farcaster is using for self sovereign account registration/ownership.
I understand, don't get me wrong, 99% of stuff in crypto is hot garbage, but having a global database that isn't controlled by any one (or even dozen) entities is pretty powerful. The 2 guys that started farcaster could quit, or get hit by a bus, or decide it's not profitable enough and pivot, but at least you have control over your profile still. If reddit was decentralized more, they wouldn't be able to shut down their APIs for 3rd party clients.
Trust me I understand the criticism of block chains, but if we want open source and the internet to thrive and not be controlled by companies, we need a global layer that is neutral.
Trust, consensus, and access control are session-layer issues that don't need to be solved by a transport-layer protocol. Social networks deserve to be able to forget things.
Which is a whole lot of extra engineering that is already taken care of with a blockchain. Whether social networks should forget your username/registration is a different debate.
It really isn't a different debate when you're talking about putting them on the blockchain, and all that other engineering has already been done by other distributed social networks.
Ok, we are talking in circles, you have your opinions, I have mine. If you want to talk about this over voice at any point, let me know, I don't think text is going to get anywhere, and Lemmy has a pretty strong bias against crypto (which I understand, but obviously disagree with)
Just uses Akkoma or GoToSocial, setup fedifetcher or follow some relays and you can get good enough experience in Fediverse. Mastodon is literally build to handle huge amount of users so it is nowhere near efficient if used for just 1 person.
@cypherpunks I've got the feeling as if the author doesn't know about the existence of relay servers. With them, also a single user instance works really fine, I think.
You mean you'll only see content from people you follow and only people who follow you will see you content? Sounds like working as intended the way things were meant to be.
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