There are many Mastodon servers run by ordinary people simply because they want to. And before the shit-show the internet has become, there were many forums and IRC channels, absolutely free, and with 0 ads.
Very low traction on these. Let me know when there’s something that people actually use in tens or hundreds of millions and random people are just providing the infrastructure out of pocket and spending all their time on this without expectation.
We've come full circle to banning advertising. It seems like we have good reason to believe that people will create the infrastructure for the communities that they _want_ to exist and fund them. So just banning advertising will probably be fine. Worst case scenario, we gradually loosen the ban. The advertising hellscape will grow back immediately, nothing of value will be lost.
Moving the goalposts much? Of course there aren't any free services serving millions currently, how could they, when Facebook/X spends millions to make sure everyone stays on their platform? Which non tech savvy would want to move to a platform without all their friends? That's the gotcha with social networks, once you grow big enough, it is really hard for people to move off of it.
Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. You are literally arguing against something that has already happened.
> Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely.
At its peak (late 1990s to early 2000s), IRC was estimated to have about 3–4 million concurrent users worldwide at any given moment, with tens of millions of total users over time.
Pales in comparison with the scale that’s needed today, given the number of people, variety of media, and bandwidth required.
Storage/compute/etc were orders of magnitude more expensive at the time, so the fact that it was 3-4 million is uh, pretty impressive? You could host a Matrix server for your 1,000 closest friends for basically no money.
You're absolutely right compute, network, and storage have continued to decrease in cost and accessibility.
The scale issue is enabling billions of consumers. It takes time and effort and skill.
It turns out that there are relatively skilled people who are willing to give their time and resources freely relative to billions of consumers in the market.
You know IRC isn't just one giant server serving every single user, right? Same for Mastodon. There were/are many different servers. Again, you are arguing against reality. IRCs/Forums have existed for decades, with hundreds of thousands of active users, with no problem whatsover. Scaling to billions is easy, since with more people using it, more people would be interested in hosting a server.
Part of the amount of bandwidth and computing power required today is specifically due to advertising and activities in the same cluster: tons of media files and javascript for ads and analytics and dark patterns and 'catchy' interfaces, all entirely unnecessary and providing no real value.
No I am not moving the goalposts, the alternative shouldn’t just exist it should actually do the job and by doing the job, I don’t mean that if people made the effort to use it, it can do the job. I mean people should be using it. Also, no people are not stupid and its not their fault for not using it.
You are completely ignoring the impact that having billions of dollars at your disposal to spend on keeping users addicted to your platform can have. There is no way a free platform can compete with X/Instagram/TikTok, even if such platform had a better product(which they do btw). Just look at Whatsapp/iMessage, both are terrible apps, there are MANY better options, with way more features, and somehow they are still the most used messaging apps in the Western.
