Re: Thoughts on directions for a rebooted SWICG

Hi everybody,

new to this list, but watching for a long time, and Hi to a bunch of friends here! Who would have thought some gazillionaire would kick-start ActivityPub adoption through his own ineptness? Or whatever it is. But we shouldn’t complain, whatever helps, we take it!!

I like Erin’s points. I would suggest framing the question like this — perhaps this is one of Erin’s themes:

Assume the Twitter exodus continues and the fediverse grows by 10x. And then by another 10x. (we can debate the exact factor): what will break? Why will it break, and what can we do that to avoid / remedy that?

Some of us are old enough to remember what happened to Usenet when AOL users showed up. (Random memory: top posting became common which used to be a reason to be banned from some groups. Many of today’s users have never seen anything else, and it arguably helped reduce quality of conversation.) It appears “AOL" users showing up in the fediverse is a very similar scenario.

Some breaks will be technical: e.g. server loads, sheer linear processing/communication time with a disproportional growth of max follower count by some accounts etc

Some breaks will be in governance: e.g. arbitrary moderation, unaccountable even malicious operators

Some breaks will be political: e.g. left and right wing servers

Some breaks will be financial: e.g. how long does volunteer moderation work if the user base grows by 10x or 100x and includes all those d**b “AOL" users?

Some breaks will be in values: what if — wild idea — all the “best" servers were to become sponsored/branded/policed by major brands who then introduce ads and surveillance etc?

And some will be malicious: how long until somebody introduces ever-so-slight protocol errors to degrade the entire network? 

So perhaps there is some kind of matrix: Erin’s themes as rows in the matrix. The above list (or similar) as the columns.

Anyway, just some thoughts, glad to be here, and glad this group is re-awakening. 

Cheers,



Johannes.
reb00ted.org <http://reb00ted.org/>
linkedin.com/in/jernst <http://linkedin.com/in/jernst>
@j12t@social.coop <mailto:j12t@social.coop>