A lot of people has been questioning why so many go to BlueSky, and I think convenience and familiar look to Twitter in the official web UI and mobile app, not having to choose an instance by having one pre-selected (although can be changed) and I was wondering if Mastodon ever had such approach, would any instance be able to handle a huge traffic and mass migration to the instance? Or perhaps shuffle by checking instances health, but then would that even be worse instead?
For those who don’t know, BlueSky is open-source, can be partially self-hosted and has API usage available free of charge, also can be bridged with the Fediverse. Which comes a long way better than Twitter and easier to reach from the Fediverse. However, it does have some questionable connections. Not possible to have investments and control them? Weird, for anyone who has heard of LadyBird (web browser) which takes a whole different approach when it comes to investment and still managed to get heavily funded.
Most of the people in the Fediverse who joined having privacy as a firat concern is well-aware and hear often privacy comes at the price of convenience, I doubt people who waited this long to leave Twitter (not even YouTube calls it X, only has the logo X) was because of privacy concern. But even if Mastodon were more convenient to those people in such way, would it even somehow be able to receive 100-150+ thousands people per day?
Wow this question is all over the place. I want to call out the privacy bit though. The fediverse is NOT private. You are anonymous, and really pseudo anonymous. Everything you post here is shared with anyone listening though. There are guidelines for how to implement the protocol, but they are not rules. Things like deletes do not have to be honored. Any gov agency can spin up an instance and listen.
We can act like we’re anonymous, but unless your hosting your own somewhere far off with no logs and zero way to trace it back to you, you’re still open. Open web means open, it’s what we want. The open web means no single entity can shut down the whole of the fediverse. The flip side is that you are also out there in the open.
I’d bet good money that a skilled malicious actor could find out exactly who you or I am within a single day. Most people don’t even use anonymous email addresses, and any admin log showing their email address, combined with an IP address, would make tracking then down trivial.
I personally use a double-hop VPN to avoid this but I don’t think that’s necessarily scalable to all users or a valid suggestion for the non-technical among us.
I used to have a VPN subscription, but most of the places I really wanted to block just blocked me instead. Lots of important services didn’t work, and it was a constant pain. So I just let the subscription expire when it ran out.
I use Tailscale with an exit node in my home country and another in Switzerland. Most my traffic goes to Switzerland, but some of it exits locally as websites block other countries. I’d rather it still pass through a VPN rather than my home IP address.
It’s mostly painless, the only website outright blocking VPNs is Reddit (which I don’t care about), but I block most other social media companies and Google properties so I’m not concerned about them.
This is what keeps me from rolling my own instance for personal use. I would need to buy a domain (linked to me) to communicate with anyone else.
It would be nice to be able to spin up an instance on i2p or Tor without still needing access to the “normal” web, but I don’t think everyone’s going to hop onto pure i2p unless it comes built in to apps.