I'm skeptical as well, to an extent. Would I rather see everybody taking on a full Free mindset and put more thought into the way they communicate, share information, etc? Absolutely. That being said, if Mastodon happens to be the spark that sets the internet ablaze and pushes adoption of tech that resists censorship and other forms of information manipulation, then I'm all for it. It's been tiring to watch the clown world of modern infosec these last few years, and any first step that brings conscientious consumption into the public discourse is a welcome one to me.
Scalability is an issue, but ideally that challenge will be met with a combination of smaller, healthier communities and larger aggregates hosted by universities and well-off Tech-minded libertarian types. It may actually be a feature, rather than a bug...
I agree with you on pretty much every point you've made here, but I think we should try to do our damndest to get people involved and signal boost the underlying protocols etc, rather than completely poopooing Mastodon. You know, just make it a well known fact that we can abscond to another AP service (a better one, with hookers and blow even) the moment Mastodon goes to shit, keep other options relevant by sharing information on them, etc.
Out of curiosity, what sorts of novel projects would you like to see? One that I can think of off of the top of my head is something like SoundCloud, where artists can share/promote/sell their music without relying on third party labels, service providers, etc.
I think you do a good job of conveying the promise of open social networks, but Mastodon is very far from this. For me, I see a few different issues with Mastodon and the wider ActivityPub concept that make me skeptical:
First off, even when you aren't under any sort of attack, it's impossible to run a Mastodon instance without spending a ridiculous amount of resource for what it delivers. Even a single-user instance can
require several gigabytes of RAM to sit around doing very little, because it's a collection of web trends from the last 10-15 years floating in space. If you want to run a server and you don't have deep pockets that furries who rape farm animals or lolicon pedos are filling with cash, you have to run a different AP server, something like Pleroma (as used for kiwifarms.cc)
Secondly, there is no real culture of free speech amongst AP instances, much like many 'free software' communities which have been corrupted by Zionists and their sickening pedophile allies. Forget Gab, which is full of conservatives who have nothing useful to say. Many 'Fediverse' instances block anyone who doesn't block Spinster.xyz, a Mastodon->Gab->it's own thing fork run for feminists who don't love girldick. The 'free' F-Droid app store removed an app set up to work with Spinster.xyz, because the sexual perverts who run F-Droid didn't like it.
Thirdly, I am unaware of any ActivityPub servers demonstrating resilience against attacks. When Gab switched to using a Mastodon fork, inevitably becoming
even more shitty than it previously was, some trolls took advantage of the ability to spam it from outside via AP, made low-effort ActivityPub spam tools and used them against Gab and other instances. They made Gab even more unusable, took down other Mastodon instances, and even slowed some Pleroma instances.
To the extent that Gab, the biggest target and the biggest Mastodon instance, has 'solved' this problem, it has been done by basically breaking all interaction with other instances. If you explicitly follow a user on another instance, you will sometimes see their posts. Now- I'm not saying that is how it has to be. Andrew Torba is incompetent and stupid and to the extent he hires anyone who isn't, I doubt he would ever make federation enough of a business priority to allow them to fix it.
If there were people who actually cared about making a stable platform that could handle open federation, could it be done within the ActivityPub framework? Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that right now, there are ActivityPub flooders that can take down really quite expensive Mastodon servers and even moderately expensive Pleroma servers, for the cost of a few bucks for a very cheap VPS. The discrepancy is so blatant that I understand the 'solution' that some of the free speech Pleroma servers found to these was to buy a very cheap booter plan and run low rate DOSs on the flooders until the garbage hosts they were rented from took them offline. The people running these tools seem to have given up since Gab effectively disabled syndication, but I don't think the problems have actually been fixed.
Speaking of the podcast host concept, I believe NextCloud allows syndication of available files with ActivityPub as well as it's own syndication protocol.
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