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Comment by beardedman | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon is too fragmented to work... well. For example; this tweet: https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1585756076305444864.

Would you really host your email on a server that some dude in rural Canada runs in his spare time? I don't think so. Not just for reliability reasons, but for privacy reasons as well.

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As with email hosting, what stops you to choose instance served by a company? Let's imagine Google Fedi+, MS Fedilook or Proton Fedi hosted from some bunker in Switzerland.

> what stops you to choose instance served by a company

That when the goodwill of said company runs out, there is very little incentive for them to maintain the service (other than trying to monetize it).

There is no free lunch. Somebody has to pay electricity bills and spend resources (time) on administration.

But you have a choice: so you trust the dude in rural Canada who pays the server bills with his harvest earnings, or you agree with monetization T&C by giving up your privacy to ads corporation, or you pay a hosting company who manages your instance on VPS, or you setup your own instance, or you participate in coop scheme where you share instance with some common interest group, or you find some rich and trusted philanthropist. Otherwise the owner can't sustain the operations and may need to shut down one day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33120136)

I think I will trust/use/invest in the company whose business model depends on me using the platform.

I'm still trying to make up my mind about all this, but it's likely that the fact that many servers are running subject to the same set of rules may increase competition since servers are highly substitutable, so a paid server business model may actually be more customer oriented because of the "Mastodon market" pressure it faces, isn't it?

Handling it less like email and more like a “well if it blows up ah well” is part of the featureset in my opinion.

Social accounts are monetizable & part of peoples brands now - “well if it blows up ah well” might be fine for you or for me, but might not be for others.

Then don't use free instances? There's a bunch of companies that would run a dedicated instance for you for a couple dozen $/mo.

Less than that. Weingärtner is 4€/month for an instance they say is suitable for up to 5 users. Masto.host is $6 for the same. This is a major advantage over centralized social media in terms of platform risk.

Arguably we’re seeing the beginning of Twitter blowing up and if that falls to Digg-like irrelevance they face a similar issue.

It's actually much closer to the email system than this analogy.

Some dude in rural Canada can run a email server in their spare time and nobody thinks the email system is any worse for it.

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