petunia

It's not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.

Donations alone on the biggest instances aren't enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won't make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.

Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.

See my other comment examining where the top 10 instances by userbase get their funding from and how well they're doing

Not to mention that over the years there have been a lot of instances that have gotten into a variety of precarious situations that could have been avoided or alleviated if they had a lot more money.

• mastodon.technology shutdown because the admin ran out of bandwidth (family member was dying)
• mastodon.lol shutdown because the admin ran out of patience (some kind of nauseating fedi admin drama)
• switter shutdown because it didn't have the legal means to comply with new online safety regulations that were being passed
• ownership of pawoo.net changed hands, twice! the first 2 owners figured it wasn't sustainable financially to keep it online.

All big fediverse instances are funded by users.

This isn't true for a lot of them if you actually take a look. Consider the top 10 instances according to https://fediverse.observer/list

• mstdn.jp, pawoo.net, mastodon.cloud are run out of pocket (by the same owner (!!!)).
• misskey.io is partially funded by ads., registrations from non-Japanese IPs were also closed shortly after the Musk takeover.
• Funding for mastodon.social and mastodon.online is co-mingled with the funding for Mastodon the software project
• baraag.net barely has the funds to secure enough capacity for the number of users it serves (registrations have been closed for the past year)
• The admin of mstdn.social was apparently short on rent this month? (!!!)
• daystorm and pravda don't count because their numbers are spoofed
• mastodon.world and mas.to can count themselves as lucky enough to be truly user-funded and (seemingly?) sustainable.

OP may not be good at phrasing things, but their concerns are completely legitimate. Almost ALL of the biggest instances are unsustainable on their own or have had to make compromises in order to stay online.

Absolutely brain-dead speculation based on literally nothing. Complicit in what??? The current owner is a very public figure, so they gain nothing and have everything to lose. It's just pure incompetence and mismanagement.

Speaking from experience, they could fix their spam and abuse woes very easily by just closing new signups or restricting it in some way. Simplest would be invite-only (built-in feature of Mastodon), or restrict the signups page based on IP range whitelist/blacklist.

EDIT: Their domain has been reinstated, and they disabled open signups. New registrations now require moderator approval https://pawoo.net/@pawoo_support/111249170584706318

:pawoo: Announcement! Thank you for always using Pawoo. Due to server congestion, new registrations will now require approval by a moderator. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

How have you determined these communities are no longer a legal concern?

The lack of an ability to prevent someone from doing something to you, without compromises on your part, is not the same thing as being okay with it being done to you.

3rd party services can access the posts, because the authors marked them as publicly accessible.

Those same 3rd party services can also index the posts in a search engine, but this is only because there is no feasible technological barrier to prevent them from doing so. If such an imaginary technology did exist, it would have been deployed already.

In the mean time, we can only count on a social solution, which is to merely signal our objections to search engine indexing, in the hope that maybe a law could be drafted that uses that as precedent to make indexing without consent illegal.

Here's a question for you. Do you think it's okay for Google or whoever to install invisible cameras everywhere in public spaces, that were explicitly for the purpose of collecting data to develop a facial recognition model to search people without their consent? Public space is public space ...

Feeds/timelines are first-class citizens in the AT protocol and are decoupled from account hosting.

On Mastodon, your timelines are computed by the same server that hosts your data. Consequently, signing up to a server to have an account on the fediverse is the same thing as joining a community. You follow the servers rules and share the same local timeline as everyone else on that server.

On Bluesky, feeds are arbitrary, fungible and provided by any server, and it can be computed/curated/moderated however they like. So communities are "built" around feeds rather than around account hosting providers.

The AT protocol also has "real" account portability (though I have not seen this demonstrated in practice https://atproto.com/guides/overview#account-portability). On Mastodon, account "portability" is a delicate dance that requires the cooperation of both the origin and destination server.

Mastodon has something that Bluesky currently doesn't: real federation. The Bluesky server that everyone signs up to doesn't federate with anyone else, since the whole protocol is still a work-in-progress.

You're conflating tagging a post as public so that it is publicly accessible as being the same thing as consenting to being indexed in a search engine.

Google and Bing's crawlers can find and index Unlisted posts just as easily as any other.

Just because there are 3rd-party search engines that don't respect people's privacy, doesn't mean that a 1st party search engine should follow their example.