Continuing the discussion from Encouraging More Folks to the Fediverse?:
Agreed. But since there’s a chance neither of us can help ourselves (we are geeks after all 
), I’m going to fork this off into its own discussion, and trying to relate it back to social music somehow.
I’ve been reading Connected Places and various other articles about the ATmosphere with great interest.
AFAIK they’re all doing this using the newer non-archiving version of the Relay. Which makes the firehose much less resource-intensive to run in the short term, but also makes the BS Relay the main source of truth for anything old enough a goldfish has forgotten it.
Maybe history matters, maybe it doesn’t. I’ll let you decide. But for a BandWagon or Mirlo equivalent in the ATmosphere, post history matters rather a lot. Don’t you think?
I say in the short term, because stripping the archiving function out of the ATProto firehose only kicks the can down the road. As CWebber’s analysis pointed out, the resources use of even non-archiving Relays increases exponentially as overall population increases, in a way the resource use of fediverse nodes doesn’t. Which means in the long term, any org running a Relay will shut it down, or take on capital to fund it exposing them an enshittogenic environment.
So more than 1 Relay doesn’t really affect my core argument. BS/AT will enshittify, sooner or later, however many capitalist-controlled relays there are (crypto mining is a relevant precedent for this) and everyone who jumped out of the frying pan into the newer frying pan will either cook, jump into yet another new frying pan, or return to the verse ; }
There’s an implied ‘always’ in there. I’m suspicious of any statement about a social reality containing an ‘always’ and even more so when it sneaks in via the subtext, rather than being explicit.
The discourse you’re referencing, here and in your previous post, represents a particular perspective - US, middle class, Democrat-aligned (or at least US-liberal) - but presents itself as representing all “blackness” everywhere, and by extension, all “People of Colour”. I don’t find any of this very intellectually credible, or useful, and unlike a lot of people these days, I’m not afraid to say so openly (see this thread for example).
And yes, I realise I haven’t directly addressed your point. I honestly don’t think there’s anything to address, for the reasons I just gave.
I’m going need to some data before I find that convincing. Also, for what definition of “diverse”? Are there huge Japanese populations on BS, as there are running their own fediverse software projects and servers? How about Chinese? How many indigenous-run infrastructures are part of the ATMosphere? Is there a wide range of neurodivergence openly represented? Genders? Sexualities?
For a network of only a few million people, run almost entirely by volunteers, and with no organised outreach as such, the fediverse is impressively diverse already.
There’s absolutely nothing stopping any community that feels under-represented - eg musicians as a global community, or local communities, or genre subcultures - from setting up their own infrastructure, or customising their own software, for the particular needs of their people. Much more cheaply and sustainable than it will ever be possible to do the same thing in the ATmosphere.
I’m not sure I like this, although it depends exactly what’s meant by ‘lock replies’. If it just means not getting a notification that someone replied, or not seeing replies when browsing the post in the author’s account, I’m fine with that. But I do believe we all have a right to make comments on statements posted in a public, even if the author of the statement chooses not to see them.
If someone posts an album on BandWagon, I think people ought to be free to post a review as a reply to their release post. If the artist chooses to hide that review from themselves, that’s fair enough. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with them being able to censor it for everyone. That seems like a backwards step.