... but then a bunch of guys in stormtrooper outfits start showing up every day and the trekkies start fighting with them and the cops are getting called out and pretty much eventually the owner is going to ask Mr. Wheaton to stop coming by.
And because it's just someone else's café, he pretty much has to do that.
The good news is, going to that café is not the only way for him to participate in the fediverse. He is the proud owner and operator of wilwheaton.net, and he can point that at his own activitypub server, that nobody can kick him off. He can bulk block all stormtroopers, interact with the trekkies in the café, and handle his own bandwidth and compute bills for delivering his content to all his fans.
Bonus: the fact he's posting from @[email protected] acts as a pretty solid cast iron guarantee of authenticity, that you are dealing with the one and only actual Wil Wheaton.
Meanwhile, Stephen King is sat at the café down the road trying to figure out why the new owner there wants him to pay him $8 a month to have the owner keep telling people who walk in 'yep, that's the real Stephen King over there'.
I've been on Mastodon since 2016. I enjoy and appreciate it. I admire the goals.
But much of the "it's intrinsically better / safe / scalable" talk seems based on little more than hope and faith, rather than evidence and engineering.
And given the Fediverse's own protocols, operating out of MyCafe rather than SafeCafe or BigCafe ... only provides modest additional protections. Yes, it helps assert identity more effectively (as I've previously noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33512169>), but it only solves a small portion of the abuse, trust, and safety concerns. Mechanisms simply are not yet sufficiently robust for a large-scale (100m -- billions of MAU) social network.
Some of that will come in time, though I've concerns that there are weaknesses that have already been baked into the underlying architecture and assumptions.
To my understanding, there were further complicating factors involved beyond just "scaling":
- At the time I heard that the mastodon.cloud instance admins and moderators spoke English as a second language (it was started to primarily focus on Japanese Mastodon, to my understanding), which added an accidental language barrier to the challenge of moderating that many reports (and being able to seek out a "root cause of the griefers")
- I still don't know how to make sense of the whole counter.social thing and Wil's supposed involvement there (which happened before the mastodon.cloud incident). I think it was partly a scam that accidentally honey trapped Wil with very bad timing, but he doesn't refer to it directly in his own account, only obliquely, so I don't think we know an answer for sure. (Only what I observed in federated Meta drama from a tiny instance at the time.) But to my understanding it still relates to some of the root causes of some of the grievances. (counter.social is a now entirely defederated instance with alt-Right associations and markets itself as "safe" and "secure" and "celebrity friendly" and "InfoSec focused" and is run by an admin referred to most commonly as "The Jester", seemingly somewhat in homage to/love for Batman's nemesis The Joker.) I can't imagine knowing the full facts ahead of time that Wil would have ever chosen to associate with that sort of instance on purpose, but I can understand (some) of why once accidentally associated with that sort of instance it caused some lasting grievances.
My understanding is that Mastodon.cloud's admin was a native German speaker. The instance was subsequently purchased by a Japanese firm. (I left during this process due both to dissatisfaction with the WW incident and lack of clarity on the transfer.)
WW had nothing to do with CounterSocial AFAIU. As the link I'd provided above shows, he'd been on mastodon.cloud at the time: <https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635779449174251>
That said, I'm frankly not familiar w/ CounterSocial, though it appears to be a Mastodon fork:
- counter.social's admin "The Jester" was the "InfoSec expert to the stars" that was behind at least one of the post-GamerGate blocklists for the safety of celebrities that Wil had been recommending to other celebrities and because of that Wil had some sort of (para)social relationship with The Jester, at least on Twitter.
- In 2017 (nearly a full year before the mastodon.cloud incident), The Jester allegedly convinced Wil to join counter.social (or deeply faked an account for him on counter.social). [1]
- That @[email protected] account went viral on Mastodon among instance admins because up until that point counter.social was only a weakly federated instance few were familiar with/"no one had heard of".
- counter.social going viral brought a lot of scrutiny on counter.social. It was quickly found to be full of accounts of transphobes and racists and worse.
- This lead to a public re-examining of The Jester's Twitter blocklists. Those blocklists were found to be themselves biased towards transphobia and subsequently celebrities were asked to disassociate with The Jester and stop using his blocklists.
- Most Mastodon instance admins I trusted blocked/defederated from counter.social in the middle of these events in 2017. (For what it was worth, I made the same decision and also blocked it.)
- I still don't think this association with counter.social was intentional by Wil. This part is mostly my speculation: It sounded like "InfoSec expert to the stars" The Jester had been trying to get any celebrity to take the bait to join Mastodon via his instance and it was a bit of an intentional honey pot trap from someone who had built up a "trustworthy" reputation on Twitter taking advantage of the consequences of GamerGate to build that reputation and only with hindsight seems to have been doing that "for the lols" and was pro-GamerGate while pretending to be anti-. (That era GamerGate of Twitter was a different time and wilder place. Hard to imagine people not having immediate paranoid reactions to someone calling themselves "The Jester" today, but hindsight is 20/20 and easy to armchair quarterback when not in the middle of the stress of it all.)
[1] The best receipt I have found so far is mastodon.social's ancient copy of the account profile and 2017 pinned intro post: https://mastodon.social/@[email protected] (this is also what I saw on my own instance at the time and matches what my instance still shows; I don't trust counter.social enough to see if permalinks track all the way back into that instance's own slimy history.)
(ETA: Also, sadly counter.social has been in the Mastodon news again lately because new people in this massive wave of Twitter users looking for a Twitter alternative have been duped into thinking counter.social is a "safe" alternative to Twitter and not a Gab-like haven for trolls.)
Wil joined what was at the time my own home instance, following something of a flameout on Twitter, itself caused by 1) people harassing him there, 2) Wil employing a shared, user-generated blocklist which 3) by both its own size and celeb-driven adoption rendered many other Twitter accounts effectively blocked --- not by Twitter, but as a result of individual adoptions of that blocklist. How legitimate inclusions were, and/or how feasible it was to get off the blocklist, I really can't say. That said, Wil arrived on Mastodon with both a large fan and foe base.
Harassment of Wil began on Mastodon.
<https://www.theglobaldispatch.com/mastadon-shuts-down-wil-wh...>
The admin/moderator was ... less than transparent or capable, and responded to a case of "this profile is causing me problems" by banning that profile rather than seeking out the root cause of the griefers who'd in fact triggered the problem.
<https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635779449174251>
Ultimate, Wil left Mastodon as well, writing his own account of the matter:
<https://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place...>
Mastodon's evolved its own tools and practices (both technically and as a community, including a community of admins), and should perform better in future, though much engineering progress emerges through pain, suffering, or worse.
Wil is, in the world of celebrity, fairly modest stakes. I've heard tales of Twitter that there was a point where it could only handle a tweet from one major celeb (e.g., Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, or one of the 'dashians) at a time, and effectively had servers dedicated to sufficiently large accounts. Celebrities proved an interesting stress-testing mechanism.
Mastodon ... has not yet experienced this, and I've my concerns with how well it might handle such scaling, or what specific elements of scaling (users, instances, posts, interactions, ...) will prove most problematic. I've certainly seen and heard of numerous cases of growing pains over the past few weeks, though nothing insurmountable.
But:
1. Celebs and brands are profile types that should be considered.
2. Mastodon's had some experience and performed poorly, both technically and culturally.
3. Adding very-high-profile profiles to the network needs some consideration. It's quite likely that there will be poorly-thought-through adoptions in future, however.