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by kibwen
1278 days ago
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I agree that having enormous general "catch-all" servers will inevitably lead to low-quality cesspits (like Twitter). But topical mastodon instances are approximately federated subreddits, and subreddits can maintain reasonable quality even with 10,000 subscribers (but once you get much larger than that you start having problems). |
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1. Moderation issues, primarily with regards to federation between instances. As an admin it's much harder to moderate with tons of users in a consistent manner, and as a user it's hard not to get screwed over by overly reactive admins either on your instance or other large instances banning your instance. I've seen tons of "guilt by association" bans on mastodon, hell I've seen people judging and domain blocking people based on the SOFTWARE they use (because they dislike the politics of that developer - not because anything that anyone on the particular instance did).
2. Privacy concerns, especially around how mastodon handles "private messages". When you are on a server that everyone is sharing a niche hobby there is a HIGHER possibility that your admin may snoop on your messages out of curiosity (or whatever justification they can generate).
3. Costs both $ and resources on these larger instances. Eventually someone will need to pay a bill and $$ pressures can lead to bad decisions.
In my opinion people should be:
1. Generally having their own stand alone instance. 2. Sharing an instance with close family / friends 3. Having secondary accounts on company / organizations instances 4. Having a read-only account on one of the larger instances just to assist in searching, discovery, etc.