Mastodon allows you to spin up your own instance if the one you’re on sprouts a mini-Elon. FC is promising something called a hub which will be like your own email server.
They don’t address the “good” or “bad” part. They address the “emperor” part.
Not perfect, but something.
Conversation
Mastodon is vulnerable to a phenomenon called preferential attachment. Big servers get bigger. Everybody wants to join the biggest server (still mastodon.social I assume? haven’t been back for a couple of years?). Still, you can exit to your own little one.
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FC will be vulnerable to a different centralization threat… similar to the one that led to e-mail turning into an oligopoly of a few providers. There it was spam. With FC, it’s other forces (history size as I understand it, which has some mitigations).
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Still, both are architected with exit in mind, and anti-monopolistic, post-capitalist affordances.
The cost is the friction. If you want to hedge against not just current Elon but all future Elons, you’ll explore one or both options anyway.
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One reason this interests me is that I see “solving for convenience” as a feature of all industrial ethos tech for 150y. It’s the heart and soul of consumerism. It has defeated repeated ideological challenges for 150y but never faced a genuine technological threat.
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Consumerism is the message of the medium of industrial tech, which to a first approximation is entirely a manifestation of centralized computing.
Both mastodon and FC are different versions of fundamentally distributed computing. The “inconvenience” is the cost of greater power.
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Ie they are not anti-emperor because the designers were (though they were). They’re anti-emperor because accessing the power of distributed computing requires giving up the features of centralized control, whether you love them or hate them.
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Many expressions of the constraints take the form of various “trilemmas”
You should get to know them, they’re fun!
1. CAP theorem
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2. Mundell-Fleming Trilemma aka why Emperor Xi is in trouble
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3. Zooko’s triangle, or why it’s hard to ensure you can have the same handle everywhere
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Emperor Elon is annoying but he’s not really annoying enough to exit to another thing that’s technologically of the same era. Emperor Jack was a nicer emperor but still an emperor. Ditto emperor Zuck etc. At best they can promise e2ee messaging and promise no backdoors.
Replying to
I see both Mastodon and FC as seeds of a more ancap post-scarcity culture. Like the Culture in fact. Really ironic that Elon names his landing barges after Culture ships and writes ancap tenets for Mars into the Starlink TOS but on Earth acts more like a Culture antagonist 🤔
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Mastodon incidentally isn’t immune to politics. While I was running a server there was constant discussion of servers being black-listed by other servers for ideology. Some admin from another server once threatened to blacklist us because he decided some toots on ours were “Nazi”
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I gave up because I didn’t want the grief of managing that crap. But the result is Mastodon has relatively clean partitions of server graph by ideology. It has a Schelling sorting effect. Result: polarized map of homogeneous patches kinda like US red/blue states.
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Mastodon to me looks like Star Trek universe. Kinda simple divisions into regimes. FC is named for the Farcaster from Hyperion, which is a much more complex and entangled universe. I hope that’s what it induces.
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4. Energy Trilemma (new to me but I trust Michael that it’s a sound one)
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Replying to @vgr
Another Trilemma people should know about is the Energy Trilemma: security, equity/cost, sustainability
not sure why this graphic needs so many triangles but there they are
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I’ve been obsessed with such trilemmas for a long time… 20-7 post about them
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All that said, I do think we’re in twitter endgame. After the Facebook flounces of ~2015-16 or so when Zuck fell from Grace, the core product has been clearly put out to pasture. After an interim messenger/WhatsApp based model, they’ve finally pivoted to metaverse.
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I’ve remained on Facebook throughout but stopped considering it for new stuff in 2016. It’s just harvest mode for me due to a couple of good groups I’m in. I have a Quest and have dipped my toe in VR. Metaverse stuff is at the same centralized/decentralized fork in the road.
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As with the Elon-Jack partnership and the Bluesky thing over the horizon, Meta has non-trivial flirtations going with federation etc. It’s not just PR. Everybody sees this fork coming. People who don’t trust Meta are messing around with decanterland etc.
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The great divide in the post-social, post-capitalist web will be between crypto vs non-crypto approaches.
Which I think of as superliminal vs. subliminal. Star Trek is a subliminal universe (not counting Q). Most other universes are superliminal. Both are valid choices.
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Crypto is an “FTL drive” type tech in that it exploits weird math/physics are produces weird social dilemmas with weird solutions. Non-crypto things produce more familiar dilemmas with familiar solutions.
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For eg on mastodon the big political problems are still right vs left etc.
In crypto, there’s some of that (Bitcoin vs ETH at least has a “right vs left” eigenvector though most people are not “maxis” but hold both) but it’s mostly new conflicts with new mitigations.
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Like MEV frontrunners vs users with ETH. Which has a weird proposed solution involving something called “danksharding.”
The conflicts are several hyperspatial jumps away from boring left vs right. Maybe they can be managed. Maybe not. But at least it’s interesting new conflicts.
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Hehe. Great minds think alike but may not be partition tolerant and therefore exhibit some redundancy.
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web3 - the "3" stands for trilemma
Show this thread
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Lol I’d forgotten I said this.
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If you really want a Third Way and you haven’t even come up with a pick-2-of-3 trilemma to work with, to get started, are you even trying.
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From farcaster founder
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Replying to @vgr
Our thinking on SMTP oligopoly:
farcasterxyz.notion.site/Decentralizati
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