@nightpool @CobaltVelvet

@CobaltVelvet (that could be b.s. wishful thinking too)

@CobaltVelvet well i think the answer is, nobody would federate with katy perry's instance because she sux

@CobaltVelvet Isn't that simply a toot being distributed then to "all" Mastodon servers? Why would that produce such a problem?

@codydh Still if we imagine migrating all birdsite to Mastodon servers without having too large instances, it's enormous

@CobaltVelvet True. I imagine if there's a future where Mastodon is a big enough player that it's an "alternative to Twitter" where Katy Perry is here, there are going to be a few gigantic instances that are popular, and then a ton of smaller instances.

@codydh @CobaltVelvet Hrm.... Actually, I think you're right. The /toot/ is distributed, but /not/ the distrubtion list. Which makes my previous comment irrelevant. It /does/ mean, though, that brands on Mastodon might lose some of the concept of "follower". As it is they lose much of the tracking and ID that's associated with FB, less so on Twitter.

Another bonus of Mastodon: you're not tracked all over the damned Web by your social channel.

@CobaltVelvet now I want a bot that is set to toot exactly once six months from now and see if we can get it allthefollows before it toots its payload

Sure it will work without that edge case, it's not *necessary* to have very famous people, but current society and all that.
that's something really important for the success of a social network these days. If something's gonna "kill" (=slow its evolution, really) it's probably that

@CobaltVelvet this is something I'd really like to simulate - set up a test fediverse of N instances on VMs on a closed network, populate them with userbases, rig the follow graph of one, set the others to boost/fav/expand/etc. and see what the numbers look like during propagation like you describe.

@djsundog yes, that'd be very interresting

@CobaltVelvet because if the network /can/ handle it, having a high profile account with personal/fan base instance with high profile account support staff moderating the instance could be highly attractive to people who now have to entrust maintaining those connections via a third party provider like twtr.

@CobaltVelvet I think the on-boarding process might be a hitch, too. The main instance needs to be available enough that Katy Perry can just wander by and set it up on a whim and start tooting; right now there's a bunch of confusing decisions to make right off the bat. The penalty for getting it wrong is relatively low, but for some people, they won't stick it out through the first migration.
Or maybe Katy's IT guy will make a bespoke instance for her and that'll be that.

@CobaltVelvet
their own instance would be great- wouldn't their fans love the local timeline too?

@CobaltVelvet I haven't looked into how OStatus/PubSubHubbub/whatever else is involved do this at the moment, but I can see a few ways to do this at scale. The celebrity instance would only have to contact each instance it federates with once (to deliver the toot). Assuming 100M followers, that'd be 100k requests with a user/instance avg. of 1k, or 10k with an user avg. of 10k. Doable.

The receiving instances know which users need to receive the toot, so that part is up to them.

@CobaltVelvet Receiving replies/boosts/favs on the celebrity instance will be a harder problem. They could probably only be operated by a few big entities.

I'd definitely agree that centralized solutions have an easier time here, though even Twitter had to spend a lot of time on that architecture. Still, it's not an impossible thing.

@pfigel Yeah once optimized enough it's doable, but still much more expensive for that person. I'm thinking that would really made adoption harder.

@CobaltVelvet That's certainly true. OTOH, if Mastodon picks up speed and a big players (perhaps a company whose social media ventures have failed in the past *cough* Google) decides to get involved and run an instance, that might be less of a concern for celebrities.

@pfigel That's also very true.

just in case someone read it later: the real question is not really technical but: How do you convince Katy Perry to join Mastodon and pay for a high-end instance and a full-time sysadmin and more CM when burdsite is free?

@CobaltVelvet only a small percent of the community of an instance needs to contribute for the rest of the community to benefit

17 people on cybrespace are donating so that 223 others can enjoy it without needing to pay a cent

@chr that's true for us but maybe not Katy Perry.

@CobaltVelvet i'm not sure what you're getting at here. Katy Perry wouldn't need to start her own instance?

@CobaltVelvet ah i didn't see the thread, but i still dispute that claim -- federation means people can follow katy perry from any instance, and all but the most rabid fans will be fine with that

@CobaltVelvet fans pay for accounts on the instance, and Katy only reads the local timeline

@CobaltVelvet we don't need a Katy Perry. i will be this instance's katy perry.

@CobaltVelvet Better brand and audience control - ensures the audience comes to your instance and hangs out in a space you create and control rather than getting sucked away by competition on a site you don't control.

@munin huh, didn't even think about that. Very dystopian. :p

@CobaltVelvet I don't think you do. If birdsite dries up in terms of exposure and mastodon is where the conversations are going on, then that alone is the selling point. And maybe there's some mastodon AAS company that she hires. IDK. But also, that's one of the things that makes mastodon antagonistic to brands, right? It's hard to have a billion followers.

@CobaltVelvet Two scenarios come to my mind:

1. Katy joins as a human person, probably under a pseudonym, but maybe not, selecting an instance that appeals to her (or maybe just one near the top of the list) and toots with us because she wants to.

2. Part of Katy's business staff determines there's value for her brand to be involved, and the cost running an instance, administration, and curating the content is less than the value generated. If that happens, bam! katyperry.social

@CobaltVelvet - seems to me there could be many benefits for someone like her to have more control over a fan community. would appeal to celebs who want to keep the conversations from getting overrun with trolls that burdsite can't control.

@lpvhouse @CobaltVelvet I'm thinking less about celebrities setting up Mastodon instances and more about organizations. Not for marketing, but for genuine engagement, customer service, etc. Could you see already-socially-minded companies like Dell or Ford with an instance? I can.

@shelholtz @lpvhouse Interesting idea. I could see some of the more progressive organizations trying that out.

@danyork @lpvhouse @shelholtz I also think about attaching the protocol to the casual blogs a la Disqus - just Mastodon instances where existing platform users can comment easily and site's community can organize itself locally better. Wordpress plugin, anyone?

@saper @shelholtz @lpvhouse But then someone has to host that local instance, right? And if I want to comment, I would need to create an account on that local instance?

Or are you suggesting that a WordPress site might effectively "federate" to the Mastodon network so that you could leave a comment using your Mastodon account? (And your comment would be posted to your Mastodon account as well?)

@danyork @lpvhouse @shelholtz
Maybe Wordpress could just speak the protocol? Act as a local identity provider, too?

Excellent example how this could work is federated wiki from Ward Cunningham (https://fed.wiki.org) - basically he made even simple sensor devices to speak the wiki protocol and federate themselves with the rest.

@shelholtz @CobaltVelvet - yes, same ability to control the conversation would be appealing for corporate CS, but challenge is getting users to go there. like trying to get them into owned forums vs. just ranting on whatever social media site they are already used to using. some companies might have loyal fanbase like a celebrity does, but majority of consumers would rather complain where their friends can see it so that they get them to commiserate.

@shelholtz Companies would have to be truly interested in supplying Customer Service, which seems rarer and rarer these days.

@CobaltVelvet But is Mastodon a social network made for such people ? I'm not saying that they should not use mastodon, but, maybe it's a place much more for common people who only want to discuss and share to each other without being disturbed by «famous people», brands or media (maybe independant ones)

@CobaltVelvet But ok, you right, it's a good technical question :)

@CobaltVelvet A handful of enterprising adopters set up instances with 'verification' analogous to that of the birdsite, use names relating to genuineness, and build in a bunch of backend spike-handling what-have-you.

I can't figure how they'd monetize it (maybe ads on some splash thing they only use for some digest-regurgitating bot of the content), but I have no doubt there's a way. I mean, they sell bags of dirt at stores, and dirt's everywhere.

@CobaltVelvet (I mean, obviously they could monetize the media aspect with ad-marking, possibly with a paid VIP pass that lets you access the pre-ad-marked versions of the media, but I don't know how that fits the stated use for Mastodon's codebase -- but capitalism figures out a way around bigger barriers than law every day)

@CobaltVelvet the only advantage of a federation would be summarization of traffic between instances, just like in multicast - one update to one instance instead of 1000s of updates for every instance's user

@CobaltVelvet I'm surprised this (current?) limitation is rarely brought up in the news article about Mastodon. Or being more openly discussed by developers.

Any estimate of the max. number of toots/users/follows an instance can support?

@jeepfromoil I don't think there's any hard limit to the federation, it just gets more expensive. Each instance is individually as hard to scale as birdsite, except birdsite profits more from that continuous growing.

@CobaltVelvet sounds like http://gizmodo.com/5632095/justin-bieber-has-dedicated-servers-at-twitter
https://mastodon.social/media/Rw0Tuuc-JBkg-64svVI

@CobaltVelvet What you're talking about basically is a multicasting problem. That's got a long history in networking, though how that would work in m6n might be up for consideration. With a dedicated server, the idea of /local/ subscriptions to that server, handling the multiplexing on the local instance, might make more sense. The brand would lose access to the specific distrubtion list, but would gain audience. An interesting trade-off.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast

@sir ofc but scaling horizontally is still much harder in some cases

@CobaltVelvet how do you figure that applies to Mastodon?

@sir just look at my other toot there's a nice example.
The point was: being famous here is expensive. Being famous on the birdsite is a favor you make to them.
It's a problem and a feature of centralization

@CobaltVelvet I guess that's true. But that also doesn't apply to most people, for whom famous only means at most ten thousand followers. Would be nice to devise a system (perhaps with PKI) that lets toots travel several hops to each follower instead of always coming from the tooter's instance.

@sir Yes, that'd be a very good way to share the load.

@CobaltVelvet @sir that smells very bittorrent-like.

@sir @CobaltVelvet I haven't studied the protocol, but I thought the idea is that a toot only gets sent once to each federate, so broadcasting to millions of users is likely to boil down to broadcasting to (only) some thousands of federates. Having a single instance with a lot of users, on the other hand, requires horizontally scaling the service, but that is a "typical" web scaling problem that can be attacked with HA proxies, caching servers, etc?