Respectfully, there is legally no pornography on the site according to the jurisdiction it operates in. At best it is obscene, and it rightfully has an 18+ policy on registered users.

This node maintains the fact that it does not allow pornography, and that all local content has artistic value.

Because baraag.net contains no pornographic images depicting 'Actual human beings' within the meaning and definitions of 18 USC §2257 OR 18 USC §2257A, the admin of this node has been advised by counsel that they cannot maintain records pursuant to those statutes.

You can try and malign them as if they're trying to "disguise" themselves to fit into society, but at the end of the day it is literally just people drawing what they like to draw. Admins are free to defederate them, they usually don't mind it since laws in most places don't align with common sense anyway, but throwing shade at a server that minds it's own business is kinda pathetic.

EDIT: Up in the thread there's an 18+ furry porn instance getting highlighted, I like how fediseer.com themselves endorses it, as if the furry porn on there isn't just "animal porn disguised as cartoon-like pictures, that some people call yiff when they want to feel like they're not zoophiles" 🤡

baraag(dot)net, long-running, stable and always up-to-date vanilla Mastodon server for an underserved niche (the "illegal in some jurisdictions" kind of niche, you have been warned!), it's remained in top 5 most active Mastodons by MAU for years. New user signups have been closed for all of 2023 and it hasn't budged.

It's not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.

Donations alone on the biggest instances aren't enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won't make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.

Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.

See my other comment examining where the top 10 instances by userbase get their funding from and how well they're doing

Not to mention that over the years there have been a lot of instances that have gotten into a variety of precarious situations that could have been avoided or alleviated if they had a lot more money.

• mastodon.technology shutdown because the admin ran out of bandwidth (family member was dying)
• mastodon.lol shutdown because the admin ran out of patience (some kind of nauseating fedi admin drama)
• switter shutdown because it didn't have the legal means to comply with new online safety regulations that were being passed
• ownership of pawoo.net changed hands, twice! the first 2 owners figured it wasn't sustainable financially to keep it online.

All big fediverse instances are funded by users.

This isn't true for a lot of them if you actually take a look. Consider the top 10 instances according to https://fediverse.observer/list

• mstdn.jp, pawoo.net, mastodon.cloud are run out of pocket (by the same owner (!!!)).
• misskey.io is partially funded by ads., registrations from non-Japanese IPs were also closed shortly after the Musk takeover.
• Funding for mastodon.social and mastodon.online is co-mingled with the funding for Mastodon the software project
• baraag.net barely has the funds to secure enough capacity for the number of users it serves (registrations have been closed for the past year)
• The admin of mstdn.social was apparently short on rent this month? (!!!)
• daystorm and pravda don't count because their numbers are spoofed
• mastodon.world and mas.to can count themselves as lucky enough to be truly user-funded and (seemingly?) sustainable.

OP may not be good at phrasing things, but their concerns are completely legitimate. Almost ALL of the biggest instances are unsustainable on their own or have had to make compromises in order to stay online.

Absolutely brain-dead speculation based on literally nothing. Complicit in what??? The current owner is a very public figure, so they gain nothing and have everything to lose. It's just pure incompetence and mismanagement.

Speaking from experience, they could fix their spam and abuse woes very easily by just closing new signups or restricting it in some way. Simplest would be invite-only (built-in feature of Mastodon), or restrict the signups page based on IP range whitelist/blacklist.

EDIT: Their domain has been reinstated, and they disabled open signups. New registrations now require moderator approval https://pawoo.net/@pawoo_support/111249170584706318

:pawoo: Announcement! Thank you for always using Pawoo. Due to server congestion, new registrations will now require approval by a moderator. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

How have you determined these communities are no longer a legal concern?

The lack of an ability to prevent someone from doing something to you, without compromises on your part, is not the same thing as being okay with it being done to you.

3rd party services can access the posts, because the authors marked them as publicly accessible.

Those same 3rd party services can also index the posts in a search engine, but this is only because there is no feasible technological barrier to prevent them from doing so. If such an imaginary technology did exist, it would have been deployed already.

In the mean time, we can only count on a social solution, which is to merely signal our objections to search engine indexing, in the hope that maybe a law could be drafted that uses that as precedent to make indexing without consent illegal.

Here's a question for you. Do you think it's okay for Google or whoever to install invisible cameras everywhere in public spaces, that were explicitly for the purpose of collecting data to develop a facial recognition model to search people without their consent? Public space is public space ...

Feeds/timelines are first-class citizens in the AT protocol and are decoupled from account hosting.

On Mastodon, your timelines are computed by the same server that hosts your data. Consequently, signing up to a server to have an account on the fediverse is the same thing as joining a community. You follow the servers rules and share the same local timeline as everyone else on that server.

On Bluesky, feeds are arbitrary, fungible and provided by any server, and it can be computed/curated/moderated however they like. So communities are "built" around feeds rather than around account hosting providers.

The AT protocol also has "real" account portability (though I have not seen this demonstrated in practice https://atproto.com/guides/overview#account-portability). On Mastodon, account "portability" is a delicate dance that requires the cooperation of both the origin and destination server.

Mastodon has something that Bluesky currently doesn't: real federation. The Bluesky server that everyone signs up to doesn't federate with anyone else, since the whole protocol is still a work-in-progress.

You're conflating tagging a post as public so that it is publicly accessible as being the same thing as consenting to being indexed in a search engine.

Google and Bing's crawlers can find and index Unlisted posts just as easily as any other.

Just because there are 3rd-party search engines that don't respect people's privacy, doesn't mean that a 1st party search engine should follow their example.

Spam has consistently been the death of the open internet, even the big tech silos struggle with spam (Instagram for example -- despite having incredibly invasive techniques for identifying "genuine" users -- is STILL inundated with spam commenters). I think instances on the fediverse should reconsider their open registration policy, either totally close registrations when you reach an agreed upon critical mass of users, or adopt some form of invitation or application system for new users. I believe Mastodon supports both in the software.

no receipts?

Matrix tackled this UX issue in the bud relatively early with https://matrix.to/. It still isn't ideal, but much better than expecting users to install browser extensions or OS-specific hacks to properly handle ActivityPub links.

I was going to join calckey.social/firefish.social but I’m a little hesitant now because mastodon.art defederated with it, and I follow multiple accounts from that instance. The drama that always surrounds defederation is a fundamental design flaw in the Fediverse

mastodon.art is unfortunately run by a harebrained power mod. Their predecessor was much much better and more thoughtful in their use of moderation powers.

a twitter-like platform needs a big central algorithm that can associate posts with certain topics and interests to be able to serve up an interesting feed

I grew up on Tumblr and it thrived for the longest time with a chronological timeline.

most people are just kind of shouting into the void and that endless storm of posts has to be filtered and organized somehow

Yes, it was done through tagging. Notably, tags in Tumblr didn't have to be inline.

Tagging died on Twitter because the inscrutable blackbox of the algorithm made people unsure if tags actually improved the visibility of their posts or not, there's some folk-wisdom that suggests excessive tagging leads to deboosting of your profile, since it could have been considered spammy. Also, there's only so many characters in a Twitter post and sometimes there's just not enough left for relevant tags.

1. This isn't just a Mastodon problem, all fediverse softwares struggle to keep an accurate tally of faves/likes/whatevers on posts from remote instances

2. It doesn't look like this anymore on mastodon.social

3. Search isn't free so it's up to the admins to decide how good/powerful they want their search bar to be.

4. It shows all followees/followers of a user if said user is local, but if the user is remote, it will only show local followees/followers of that user because knowing what remote accounts follow what remote users also isn't free.

The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone

Nothing about Mastodon or the fediverse prevents this. In fact government institutions are already using the fediverse this way: https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission https://social.overheid.nl/@belastingdienst There's some companies who run their own instances also, and no shortage of individuals running single-user instances as a subdomain of the same website they use for their professional brand.

Decentralized =/= Federated. In a federated model, data is still siloed in 24/7 servers that are controlled by people or institutions.

PaperWM really should be its own DE. It's so good, almost perfect, but held back by its nature of merely being a GNOME extension.