from Hacker News

Mastodon Sustainability – hosting costs, scaling concerns, and problem users

by lim_nick on 4/11/17, 12:04 AM with 10 comments

• by AlexMax on 4/11/17, 12:39 AM

  I think this gives too much credit to blacklist-driven policies and not enough credit to attackers.

  Back when IRC was new, open federation between IRC servers was the norm until bad actors forced the networks to only federate with known good actors, and to quarantine parts of the network that still allowed open federation - there is a reason why EFnet was called Eris Free. That was back in the 80's and early 90's. Today, attackers are far more sophisticated, and not even Twitter, who has $$$ to throw at the problem and owns the entire stack, is capable of stemming the tide of bad actors, spam, and fake accounts. Taking money seems like a good idea at first, but then suddenly you have to deal with credit card fraud.

  I anticipate that Mastodon will balkanize, ending up with a couple of large networks, IRC-style, that federate only with each other, and have unified, agreed upon set of rules and a super-moderation team that can act on any node. Networks that insist on open federation will lose the battle against the tide of bad actors and will dissolve into anarchy and either shut down or start whitelisting with the rest of them.

  I would really like to be convinced otherwise on open federation.

• by confounded on 4/11/17, 2:02 AM

  I'd be much more likely to pay if the instance had a different name!

• by luma on 4/11/17, 1:12 AM

  I love the idea presented here, where there's a low and affordable up-front fee to act as a small speedbump to anyone wishing to spam or otherwise abuse the network. They can register a thousand accounts, but it'll cost them $5000 to do it, and if they're a jerk, the accounts can be yanked. If you think you want back in on the "party" (love the name), you can still do so but it's once again going to cost you.

• by mxuribe on 4/11/17, 2:15 AM

  Whatever reasonably progresses federated social networks - like Gnu Social-based networks like Mastodon - forward sounds good to me!

• by ahmeni on 4/11/17, 12:22 AM

  It will definitely interesting to see if the $5/registration model will pan out with a newer service as a quality filtration method without a locally established community in place first.

• by brian-armstrong on 4/11/17, 3:26 AM

  So, App.net?