Ruario's Journal
The following is a 'stream of consciousness' (micro *log style).
2022-11-20
12:00 +0100
I recently posted this on the fedi as my Dolphin Town user and challenged users to work it out
eeeeeEeEeeEEEeeE
Spoiler
$ echo "$((2#$(echo eeeeeEeEeeEEEeeE | sed 's/e/0/g;s/E/1/g')))" 1337
2022-11-19
12:17 +0100
I find the fedi a bit overwhelming at the moment. It is great that people are coming here and getting away from the influence of Elon and a locked environment. And yet…
- I now have as many people following me as I ever did on Twitter and the interactions and notifications are pretty full on
- I worry about scaling of the whole system and also the instance my employer runs
- I worry about moderation on the instance my employer runs
- I worry about how much time I have to dedicate to my real job
- I am spending evenings looking at fedi posts and moderating rather than going out cycling
P.S. I am posting here because this is my (semi) secret place.
2022-11-17
00:19 +0100
Hmmm… time for bed methinks!
2022-11-15
21:52 +0100
Vivaldi Social and Fediverse instance size.
I am posting here because my fediverse accounts (@ruari@velocipederider.com and @ruario@vivaldi.net) are a little overwhelming for me right now, with constant notifications. Also I want to write a little longer. Not a complete post perhaps but a little more than 500 characters.
So today Vivaldi Technologies (my employer) launched our own Mastodon instance, which we call "Vivaldi Social". I have been involved in various ways but as much as anything it started with me floating the idea of us doing something like this back in July.
We started small. On the 21st of September we launched a public account on mastodon.online but it was really "just me" as an experiment. This did relatively well in the sense that users engaged and chatted with us. Quite a few of them considering the small number of followers and I think it sparked more interest within the company.
From then on I had chats with more people, including our CEO. Eventually this snowballed into, "let's make this available to all our users". Or at least all those with Vivaldi accounts (for Vivaldi sync and the like), which I should add is over a million people.
Today we launched and the feedback was generally positive but of course there were people who worried about our size and influence and that we would try and take over via embrace and extinguish. It is hard to get across that this is not going to happen. I know this because I know the people involved and the way the company is structured and run but… sure from the outside I see the issue. This is a matter of trust and trust is earned and many of the people commenting do not know us.
One thing several people suggested was to keep the instance size down but the more I think about this, the more I think they are considering it the wrong way. They want us to do this so, to self censor so that we do not have too much influence but what about our users. Should they not be given the possibility of easily accessing the fediverse? Also should we not try and help with the fact that almost every instance is overloaded and we are sitting on spare capacity. The easiest way to share this is to run an instance, anything gets very complex fast.
Also what does self censoring our size do. The next company that is interested might say "fuck that" and have bad intentions anyway. Surely it is better that if there are going to be some big players (and I kind of see that as inevitable unless the system was designed from the get go to prevent it), that companies like ours counteract that be being committed to open standards and not embracing and extending.
Finally how big should an instance be? Different people say different things but many are talking in the low thousands of users. Ok and if the billions of people who use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram want to experience a better, kinder social media, who will run the millions and millions of instances. It is beyond most people and even small organisations (unless they are tech focussed). Also what about organisations that are bigger than thousands of users, do they need multiple instances for just for their employees. I used to work for GE, it currently has 168,000 employees. How many instances should it have for just for employees, since it is not allowed to have one? What about the British NHS, which in 2016 employed around 1.6 million people. How many instances should it have for just its employees.
The root of the problem for me is not the size, since you cannot prevent a Google or Amazon deciding to start an instance and instantly having "too many" users. Rather it is a commitment to interoperability and allowing easy migration, so that big players (no matter how big) cannot take over.
And… yes I should have just written a proper post! 😆
Vivaldi Social intro video (featuring me)
Vivaldi Social announcement on our company blog
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ruario.flounder.online/