I am not talking about people like you that get involved in the communities they enjoy. I am talking about those that seem to be dedicated to a personal mission.

Yeah, I didn’t get this part either. I will take a look later to see if I can turn the this into a more traditional web app.

I agree with almost all of your points, but I don’t think that it’s okay to normalize guilt by association, and I call them “the mob” because I see these calls for defederation less as a real concern for their safety and more of instrument to enforce compliance.

I think there is a spectrum between what you did (you were mod until you no longer thought that the pain of dealing with Reddit was worth it or morally justified) and someone who sticks around as a mod of 50+ subreddits because they see as an instrument of control, or someone that keeps running a big Mastodon instance despite financial struggles; and my point is to understand where most people lie.

Just because you made the mistake buying into a shitty walled garden like iOS doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for other people.

So much misfires in one single sentence. Impressive.

• “you made the mistake”: I am not talking my phone, but from other people that I want to talk to.
• “shitty walled garden like iOS”: I may not like, and you may not like, but there are 20-30% of the whole world that to do prefer to have a phone that gives them a walled garden and gives them some peace of mind. But instead of accepting that other might have different values than you, you try to dismiss their values as secondary to your cause and you pass your values as something that should be universal. Are you noticing the pattern here?
• doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for other people: if someone on Android can not have video calls via XMPP with someone on iOS, then no, it doesn’t work for neither of them.

I see a pattern here of you ignoring reality

You want to keep believing that your solution is superior and that the problem is with everyone else that keeps choosing the wrong things? Fine, I will not be able to convince you otherwise. But to keep being presented with actual experience from other people and respond by saying that “they are ignoring reality”? This is just silly.

No, I missed it before.

My “axe to grind” is not against mods. My “axe to grind” is against Small Fedi. I can elaborate more later if you want, but now I need to get back to work…

I’d say that they are the same thing, just in different contexts. But okay, if I wasn’t clear it’s on me to fix it.

I legitimately did it because I had been a member of the community for years and really felt passionate about keeping its standards and making sure it remained safe for the community.

Would you do it for a community you didn’t care about?

Do you think that doing something because you “really felt passionate about it” is “selfless”?

You are having Stockholm syndrome if you think otherwise.

I am not picking a favorite. I’d like XMPP to succeed. I still have my accounts. I still occasionally check if the apps improve to the point where I can install on my parents’ phones and having them using it, and every time I failed.

Element is far from great, but I did manage to set it up for my parents, for my wife and then at least we can share pictures, we can have video calls so that they can see and talk with their grandkids, and we can have a family group, and we can have reaction emojis when someone says something funny.

Can you at least consider not being so condescending, and maybe see that other people have different priorities and values than you?

Just on one very small and developer hostile platform that outside of the US and Japan hardly anyone uses

Oh, come on!

• 35% market share in Europe
• 22% in China.
• 14% in South America

XMPP does not work perfectly fine. You can cover your eyes and ears all you want, but stop gaslighting people.

The rest would be some maganged opposition only existing because Mark lets them. But we had that argument before.

Yeah, right. You’d rather deny the existence of literally over 1 billion people just to keep your belief that your solution is better for the people. Excuse me if I don’t buy your "argument*.

It is a broader issue, namely: there is no such thing as doing a “thankless” job for purely altrustic reasons. This is not an issue on a small scale, but once it reaches it some critical mass we should wonder what motivates those who keep a position of authority.

(And before I get another barrage of people saying “I do it because I care about it/ I want to help / someone needs to do it”… yeah, sure, but if you are cultivating something because you happen to like the thing at hand , then you are doing for your own personal interest and it is not entirely altruistic. And that is totally fine.)

it gives them personal satisfaction to help out with something that is meaningful to them.

What about the cases where “what is meaningful to them” conflicts with “what is meaningful to the others”?

I said on a sibling comment but it bears repeating: I am not talking about someone who enjoys a hobby and goes on to create/mod a community about it. I am thinking about the cases where someone finds themselves as part of a large community and realizes that the majority of the members keep pushing you to things you either don’t want to or disagree with.

Matrix had never even close to a few hundred million users.

Yeah, completely typo’ed here. I wanted to change from “hundred of thousands” to “a few million” and ended up with the worst combination. Too late to edit, now.

what Mark Zuckerberg thinks the Fediverse should become.

If you ask me, I think Zuckerberg wants to commoditize the social graph and position his company to become the AWS of social web applications. It would be the best way to skirt all regulations (because he would claim that he is only providing infrastructure and is not liable for the content) and it would let he profit from the others by providing service and by snooping on the data they get through their servers.

And you know what? I’d be absolutely fine with him trying to do it. I actually would like to see how this would play out. I’d rather have a world where Zuckerberg has the "AWS of social media’ than a world where he has “Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram and whatever competition he manages to kill by buying them off”.

A world where Zuckerberg owns the AWS of social media implies a world where others like Hetzner, OVH and all the gajillion VPS low-end boxes can exist. As horrible and morally bankrupt Zuckerberg is, letting him make this move would be an improvement over the status quo.

Even if some compromises have to be made, a world where Zuckerberg controls 30-40% of the social web leaves us all some room to work and maintain a healthier alternative to our friends and family. And this is a better world than the one where we pretend to pass ideological purity test but inevitably need to install and use WhatsApp to talk with a friend or to send a picture to my parents.

Vital parts for running a somewhat decently sized Synapse instance are not AGPLv3 licenced.

Define “vital” and define “decently sized”. What point does AGPL Synapse becomes impossible to use? Are we talking about an instance for an university with a few thousand students and faculty? A company with a few hundred employees?

Couldn’t that issue be solved by simply breaking a larger instance into smaller subgroups? Couldn’t this “soft-ceiling” on instance size be actually a positive thing, as it would encourage better distribution of the user base among different service providers?

But more importantly, why should I care so much about theoretical, technical limitations that affect virtually no one and give preference to an alternative ecosystem that does not even have an decent client that people can use to make video calls?

it just results in recreating the same shit we already have

This is you passing opinion as undisputed truth. I am not proposing “Let’s take on the big corporations by building another big corporation”, I am saying “we can get rid of the dominance from big corporations if we help foment an economy of small, independent businesses.” and I am saying “if we keep this anti-business culture where we are hostile to even some food truck owner trying to connect to their customers, then don’t complain when the food truck owner continues using Facebook/Instagram/Twitter”.

And that “open-source alternative” is now open-core

Synapse is still AGPLv3. Their closed parts are for Enterprise. No one is being locked out of crucial features. No one is being locked out of reaching out other users of the network. No one is being forced to “upgrade” after reaching a certain size. To call it open-core is just yet-another display of bias.

and most likely suggested this (Monal) instead.

Monal does not make video calls! Not having video calls was a non-starter in 2015, let alone today.

because that is really a clear example of how unsustainable and ill advised that kind of growth is.

Is it? Because so far I managed to talk with a lot more people on Matrix than I ever did on XMPP, and that wouldn’t change even if Element closed shop tomorrow. And even if it did, the odds would be highly in favor of some other company like Beeper picking up the pieces to serve its customers and it would still be in their interest to keep things open to have the ecosystem around.

So, at the end of the day, yes, I’d rather have this “unsustainable” growth than claiming any moral victory for sticking to the Betamax of chat protocols. This “unsustainable” system gave me and few hundred million people something that is far from perfect, but at least it can make video calls on iOS.

Hey, any comparison to Ayn Rand or their fans should be an immediate ban. No need to go that low.

All I’ve been arguing with you could be summed up as “if we want the Fediverse to be universal, we will need to grow a lot faster and we need to accept the reality that not everyone values the same things as you do” and you responding “No, I don’t to make the Fediverse universal because most people are too morally weak to stand for the things I care about”.

(And if you think I am exagerating: don’t make me look for the conversation where you said that people should be okay using this crap because the other open source alternatives committed the grave sin of “raising money from investors”.)

What “difference” is someone doing by being a mod of 50-odd subreddits, like the case of the mod in question?

I am not at all talking about the cases of someone who is passionate about some topic and then goes on to cultivate a community around it, and I am not saying “every moderator is doing it for some ulterior motive”.

I am talking specifically about the types that put on themselves to become mods of dozens of subreddits. Or instance admins that go months in a row begging for money to be able to pay their own bills, instead of shutting down the instance or make it only for those that contribute back.

IOW, I am talking about the cases where people act beyond what anyone would consider “healthy”.

When the stakes are small, sure.

But if you were to find yourself with a community with hundreds of thousands of people, and let’s say that 0.01% percent of any group is made of people who seem like they are out to just make everyone’s life miserable, so every week we will have to deal with a couple of dozen cases of obnoxnious behavior, petty disputes, etc… how long do you think you’d be able to endure it?

Speaking for myself: I was remembering the time when I found myself as the owner and main mod of the University’s group on Orkut. When it was mostly discussions among actual students and faculty, it was all nice. Even when discussions were heated, they were not out of control. But when Orkut exploded in Brazil and it became a place for soapbox politics, spam, shouting matches between the student factions, people wanting to share articles about city events, etc, etc… it became too much for me and the handful of co-owners that joined me in the period.

Some people chose to do the right things because they are right

This is just another way of saying that people do things for moral validation - a.k.a, self-righteouness - and is no at all different from “power tripping”.

I just want to tag @sam@endurance.racing because I know that he is also looking to build a community of racing enthusiasts.

Just to respond to point (6): From the blog post, there is a link to a post from someone moving from fosstodon to hachyderm that says:

Overall I’m satisfied with the moderation process and neutrality on Fosstodon. What to do? As a Fosstodon user, it’s hard to see any future path with the instance that works in my favor. (…) Most will never know anything about the name other than “the instance which allowed a nazi mod”. While I believe the characterization is 100% untrue and unfair, the die is cast for lots of people.
If I stay, the likely outcomes are:

• Limited communication with some other people, because some other instance mods will choose to block Fosstodon
• Will have to explain my choices and the highlights of this post any time someone says “eeeww, Fosstodon”, occasionally and probably forever
• Some people will incorrectly assume I hold certain views based on my association with fosstodon

So, yes, at least one person is moving to another instance not because they are particularly against the admins, but for fear of being judged by association.