Thread by @edefic

@olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend i can't say with certainty that nobody on the instance followed those tendencies
personally i left the fediverse because it showcases some of the most depressing political tendencies of this era, including what you're pointing at

@olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend but for this particular project, getting them to shut us down was the intention, the apotheosis of it as a piece of performance art living on borrowed time from day 0

@olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend i bought the domain in ~2016, sniping it from someone else who'd had the same idea (and was coincidentally in overlapping communities)
it sat idle for ~2y until i started a mastodon server on it with friends in mid-2018

@olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend we built out an invite tree system, inspired by and conversations about reputation systems and incentive-compatible decentralised systems with Dominic Tarr while we worked on Secure Scuttlebutt (which later gave rise to Bluesky's protocol)lobste.rs

@olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend i had to learn enough Ruby / Ruby on Rails to implement that, and i really did not enjoy that, but it worked out really well over the ~5.5y lifetime of the project from my understanding

@olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend initially the infrastructure for it ran on GKE because my (ill-fated) startup had a shitload of GCP credits we couldn't use up before expiry

@olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend hidden in a GCP project named "proletarian-praxis-[random ID]" because i was a dyed-in-the-wool anarchocommunist at the time, and iirc the GCP random pet name generator gave me something with "praxis" in it once

@bitemyapp @olivertraldi @default_friend my biggest fear was that we wouldn't manage to keep the project alive until that point, that there wouldn't be anything interesting to ban. some of us were leftists at the time or are today, but certainly none of us had illusions about the taliban wanting our heads cut off

@olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend i started the mastodon server with @erincandescent and embr (who i think is probably not on twitter anymore), but Erin ran the social and technical infrastructure for the past few years (and is fielding calls from journalists currently)

@olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend @erincandescent Erin was also the author/editor of the original ActivityPub spec, which is what powers the fediverse, because of course everything interesting in the world is done by a pretty small collection of people :p

@absynot @olivertraldi plus, if that had happened, i wouldn't get to use "talibanned" to describe it, which would've been a real waste of an excellent portmanteau

@ArgonGruber @bitemyapp @olivertraldi @default_friend the only way you can wipe an instance from the internet is by the domain being seized, it's essentially like a website or an email address

@ArgonGruber @bitemyapp @olivertraldi @default_friend ie your email host can ban you, an individual user, but the only way the email host is getting banned is by the domain being seized

@ArgonGruber @bitemyapp @olivertraldi @default_friend Mastodon is a piece of software that implements that protocol, and the fediverse is the collection of things that speak that protocol, in the same sense that you can conceive of an "emailiverse", which is so ubiquitous that we barely even mention it

@ArgonGruber @bitemyapp @olivertraldi @default_friend like how "the internet" is the collection/network of things that speak the Internet Protocol and the broader associated suite of protocols (including email, HTTP, and a load of other stuff)

@ArgonGruber @bitemyapp @olivertraldi @default_friend twitch is heavily centralised, there's one collection of servers controlled by one organisation (Twitch/Amazon), and you are their at their pleasure
it's like a party in one person's yard, and they can tell you to get off your lawn whenever, and impose whatever rules they want

@ArgonGruber @bitemyapp @olivertraldi @default_friend the same goes for Twitter, if Musk doesn't like me i'll be off here in an instant
but the same goes for DNS, the domain name system, it's ultimately controlled by a US non-governmental organisation (ICANN), and delegated in turn to individual countries from there

@ArgonGruber @bitemyapp @olivertraldi @default_friend but if it's public to any degree, sooner or later someone will find a way to bridge the two, like how you're unlikely to have an isolated postal system, because someone will eventually volunteer to forward post between them

@ArgonGruber @bitemyapp @olivertraldi @default_friend though it's definitely much lower bandwidth than within a single brain, unfortunately

@GeekerChan @olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend @erincandescent i raised ~$1.7M in funding for my startup doing challenging technical work in a difficult industry (working with telcos & cable industry to bring edge compute closer), and am very glad other people were willing to buy that much risk off me so i could attempt something innovative

@GeekerChan @olivertraldi @bitemyapp @default_friend @erincandescent we ultimately failed for various reasons i'd rather not get into publicly, but having supportive VCs willing to back our vision with capital and connections was invaluable, and i am richer in experiences, though not money, for the attempt

@GeekerChan i do my best to meet people on the internet in good faith, all that i can hope is that i receive the same in return
glad it worked out here