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Maybe Bluesky has "won"

(anderegg.ca)
461 points GavinAnderegg | 2 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.412s | source
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GMoromisato ◴[15 Nov 24 23:50 UTC] No.42152687[source]▶
I remember Quora circa 2016 fondly. It had a high number of interesting people writing deep insights into their area of expertise. And then, of course, since they are a venture-backed startup, they tried to grow, and it all went sideways.

I think a small, somewhat homogeneous community is very attractive. You get a high ratio of interesting posts and very little toxic behavior.

The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. Technology won't solve this problem (because it is not a technology problem). Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.

Maybe the balkanization of social media is the best we can hope for.

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fsflover ◴[16 Nov 24 10:15 UTC] No.42155628[source]▶
> The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. ... Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.

Every problem you mentioned is solved by Mastodon. Independent instances can and should stay relatively small to allow good and independent moderation, while the whole network can grow a lot without being homogeneous.

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1. GMoromisato ◴[16 Nov 24 17:16 UTC] No.42157518[source]▶
Maybe you're right--we'll see.

How big do you think a Mastodon instance can get before it's too big? Right now the largest instance is maybe 1 million users. Let's say that's a good size. To get 3 billion people on it (Facebook's scale) we'd need 3,000 different instances, right?

Except, people won't evenly distribute. Instead, we'll have a power law distribution. The largest instance will be maybe 500 million users, the next largest will be 200 million, and so on. That means that most Mastodon users will be in Twitter-sized instances, and you'll either have to spend a ton of money on moderation (except, I don't know who pays) or you'll end up with the usual toxic anarchy.

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2. fsflover ◴[16 Nov 24 18:00 UTC] No.42157815[source]▶
> The largest instance will be maybe 500 million users, the next largest will be 200

Yes, this is likely indeed. Those instances will probably be unsustainable and/or user-hostile, but users are always free to leave to another instance without much to loose.