Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy

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It blows my mind that places like the transit systems that were on Twitter haven't migrated over to their own Mastodon server. They're not that hard to set up, and there's so little risk when you just don't accept public signups on your domain.

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The thing about Mastodon for influencers is... you don't even have to leave Twitter. Just post to both.

If enough people get into that habit, it makes the transition much easier for everyone.

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I agree. The Fediverse stuff is really well suited for governments and businesses. They can be in complete control of their instance, post whatever information they want distributed, and they don't need to rely on any other business for it.

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Twitter is very friendly to influencers because it automatically boosts popular posts and hashtags. Mastodon doesn't by design, so they're gonna have a much, much harder time there.

That's an okay decision to take, but it makes it hard to grow the network because there's a lower financial incentive.

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How much of the fediverse runs on AWS and how willing do we think besos would be to pull the plug on those?

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Yeah. I'm surprised businesses haven't been quicker to setup self-hosted Mastodon as their primary, and then mirror that to Twitter and Bluesky and such, for disaster recovery protection.

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Mastodon doesn't by design

There is a trending section, and it does boost popular tags based on user interaction. It doesn't shovel crap into personal feeds like traditional social media, but it's not entirely lacking discovery features either.

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They don't control the domain registrar's at least. Yet. (Or at least not de jure)

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Don’t they have their own DNS? It’s called Route 53 I think?

Though I don’t think you are required to use it with your AWS hosts. But that’s not exactly what I meant by pulling the plug. They could quite literally pull the plug on your service. (Disconnect you from switches/routers, power off your hosts, etc.)

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Oh indeed, don't disagree there, we are as in most respects, at the mercy of our corporate overlords

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You'd need something that is literally only a few clicks and it's set up, and it auto updates with 0 user intervention. Until that happens your typical business will never want to touch their own hosted mastodon server.

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Yeah. I think we're waiting for the kind of installers and updaters that WordPress achieved before we see typical businesses running their own.

But I do think many organizations have got the risk/reward wrong, by underestimating the risk, at the moment.

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Not much, probably. For small scale usecase, like a VPS, AWS is horrifically expensive. For a 4GB of ram VPS, AWS is 30 USD a month, whereas you can get that for 10 USD a month, elsewhere.

AWS does this because of vender lock in. For the few times when a consumer of theirs needs a VPS (or some other service cheaper elsewhere, it's less effortt to continue to use AWS than to go someplace else.

But for individuals and small organizations, like the fediverse servers, we can just start out on the cheaper options.

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Trending section often unusable and basically only rewards the majority (a.k.a Western fediverse).

If you host instance for non-English language for local communities, trending will quickly populated with Western/US-centric conversation and news.