So... this seems like a good time to start experimenting with Mastodon.
I'm very skeptical about the chances of getting enough network effect to bootstrap a new social media site in general, and even more for distributed/decentralized/non-commercial ones.
Still, recent events on Twitter make me believe there is a chance, and I'd like to help make that happen.
@pwuille I think the big problem we're going to see is that Mastodon has much worse protections against spam than Twitter does. That's not a problem yet. But it will be in the future. And dealing with it could destroy the ability of small instances like mine to federate with others.
If email didn't have big companies like Google pouring money into anti-spam, it'd probably be dead already.
Bitcoin can fix this by making spam costly. But the people behind Mastodon hate crypto currencies.
@silverpill @pwuille Both. Though payments don't necessarily mean paying someone in particular: you can also sacrifice BTC to make a cryptographic identity expensive to obtain.
This is probably better than hash cash as it's easier to determine the value of the payment/sacrifice.
What about just a timelocked output like joinmarket uses for its fidelity bonds?
