Re:Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
by hnbad on Friday March 10, 2023 @08:33AM
(#35094126)
This assumes you (or rather: those users) want all of those billions of users to be directly interconnected.
Most people on Mastodon seem to be perfectly fine with living in a microcosm compared to Twitter.
Re:Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
by AnthonyMouse on Friday March 10, 2023 @07:30PM
(#35103455)
Humans demand connectedness. There's something to be said for participating in seven independent communities with seven independent accounts, but when you see something from Community A and want to share it with Community B, a system that doesn't allow either account to make that connection is going to frustrate people, and get outcompeted at the system level by something that does.
Suppose the network wants to be able to handle billions of users, but you want to keep each instance "small," i.e. thousands of users.
Then you'll have millions of instances.
Having each instance manually curate a list of others it federates with isn't going to work, but neither is instances not federating with the large majority of other instances.
You all need to figure out a way to get rid of this instance-level whitelisting or blacklisting, because that ends with either Meta or an intractable scalability problem.