Recent searches
Search options
"In 2024, it cost $N to run a Mastodon instance with ~1000 active users for a year. By the end of 2025, that figure had dropped to $0.5N, due to the launch of X, Y, Z."
What are X, Y, and Z?
In terms of cost, consider systems administration and moderation as paid work, even if the admin is not paying themselves for either of these things.
@mekkaokereke I suspect there's more than one startup who will offer AI moderation as one of the three - there must be enough public social media data to train a decent spam filter.
Mastodon/ActivityPub extensions for common platforms so anyone with an existing community can extend it into the Fedi without new hardware
A Mastodon fork optimised for shared hosting so a small admin team can run hundreds of instances on a handful of servers
@craignicol @mekkaokereke No one is going to use an instance that abdicates moderation in favor of AI shit. Pattern recognition that cannot see and understand outside context cannot accurately moderate.
@dalias @mekkaokereke people accept instances with barely any moderation (well, a lot of instances defederate them, but they remain popular) and I'm sure threads will stay. It's not something I'll be comfortable with, but it's a trade-off people who don't feel threatened here might accept.
@craignicol @mekkaokereke The horror of AI shit doing moderation is not false negatives but false positives. No one wants to be where they'll get randomly banned by opaque processes.
@dalias @mekkaokereke I know people who had temporary bans from Facebook for unknown reasons but got reinstated and are still there. I don't see why that behaviour wouldn't be replicated here. If moderation isn't something you think about much, why would it matter to you if it was a faceless AI or a faceless minimum wage worker (or volunteer) that's deleted that one message in support of Harris?
@craignicol @mekkaokereke On Facebook they stay because it's holding their social relationships hostage. On fedi there's no reason to stick with a shit instance that's at high risk of taking your social relationships away when there are plenty of good ones.
It's a pretty strong indictment of the model and Nomadic Identity protocols only mitigate some of the flaws.
@lispi314 @craignicol @dalias @mekkaokereke
I want to note something, as the person in charge of moderation on a major server: there is a lot that can be done and hasn't with non-AI based automated moderation. Why is there not a feature built into Mastodon to...
- automatically report posts with racial slurs when they show up?
- automatically report when a user posts the same link several times in a row?
- automatically report when a user from your instance has been mentioned or linked on a hashtag like FediBlock?
- remind users of the report button when they get PMs that might be potential harassment?
We don't need AI. It would be wasteful, very costly, and likely have serious trust and reliability issues. We just need better systems to be built in by default to help us volunteers catch things quickly.
@craignicol @dalias @mekkaokereke If you want to know what that experience is like, ask anyone who has ever posted nude images on any platform. It absolutely sucks and is one of the most efficient destroyers of trust in any platform where it happens. "they are still there" elides a lot of frustration and also is a form of survivorship bias - some people are not still there, but you don't hear from them.