What is up with everyone wanting to buy their very own confederated social network these days?
Monday, October 17, 2022
So I checked the news and saw that Kanye says he is buying himself a confederated social network, which is how I have found myself referring to the odd proliferation of Mastadon instances that have turned off their p2p API.
Ok, so I have to admit that I went and joined a Mastadon instance and I still have one. I don't think you'll have a hard time finding it, but I won't link to it here.
Mastadon is the same as you'd expect it to be, just another "federated" social network with the same problems they have always had which is that 100 users sign up, and then the admin starts begging for money and if no one gives them money then they say they have to shut the instance down and everyone loses all of their connections when they export their list to another instance.
To anyone who's ever messed around with cyphernets this is a stupid concept. If you designed a p2p system why would you not design it so that the posts live on all of the instances instead of just the one? Well, because people want to be able to post something and then delete it, that is why. They want to say obnoxious things on the record, and then delete the post and pretend they never said those obnoxious things.
And I'm saying that as a person who has hit the delete button a lot of times.
To join a Mastadon instance is to expose yourself to a weird culture of far left commentators who have a "federation" (imagine Star Trek without space and warp drive) and all they do is talk about the far right "confederation" (all of the people who have forked Mastadon and claim to be have a special purpose acquistion company about to acquire their badly maintained fork in defiance of SEC rules). And then there are a few sane people in the mix who are kind of centrists and just joined Mastadon because everyone else is on there.
I'm sure I can go on and on about Mastadon's weird fringe cultures on the far left and the far right, but everyone already knows all about that stuff so I won't bore you.
What I'm interested in is why is Kanye buying a Mastadon when he could very well set up his own Kanye Mastadon if he took a day off from acting out to focus for a second, get himself a VPS and install the software himself.
Anyway, I don't really care. I want to be a Kanye fan, but if he's on a far right or a far left federated or confederated Mastadon instance then I will have to stop being a Kanye fan. I wish he would start a far out of center Mastadon and keep it open so I can follow him from the Mastadon that I'm on instead of indulging in this political confederate/federate drama.
And of course I must say that I'd prefer an Internet that is free and open where people can subscribe to who they want to and don't have to hear from people who they don't want to. To do that I think we will need some keypairs and some digital signatures and then our posts can live on all of the instances. Someone just needs to write one of these cyphernets that actually works... I'll do that as soon as I have the time, in the meantime Bogbook is still a little boggy.
Of course all you have to give up when you move from the (con)federation to the world of cyphernets is the giving up of the delete button. But for Kanye and Elon and Trump you don't have to worry about that anyway, it doesn't matter who censors them we still get to hear about all of the idiotic shit they said today whether we want to or not.