Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/19/race-to-the-bottom-2.html
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Ummm… No it doesn’t.
The whole point of federated systems is to scale by spreading out the workload and bandwidth. (I don’t have a node set up yet to see what they’re doing.) It’s certainly a problem that’s been solved in the past for Usenet and torrents.
I think there must be something else that’s forcing them to centralize. Do they have a revenue stream for providing this service?
ETA: Looked at site. I’m not really sure why they’re using Mastadon. To enforce their code of conduct, moderation, age limits, they need a centralized system. (I have some notes of ideas to get around that, complicated.) For their purpose, they could be using any message board software, because it’s not for the federation.
I guess Mastadon provides more of the Facebook-like experience that people expect these days.
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Cloudflare’s main purpose is to handle failover situations (e.g. a site that’s getting DDoSed). It’s not really a cloud host, more a cloud-based live backup/mirror system that kicks in temporarily when the main site is down.
I’m not sure why it would be needed with a Mastadon instance, for the reasons you describe.
It’s too bad that holy roller lawmakers and information-greedy law enforcement/spooks/companies don’t understand the idea of elastic recoil in systems.
Push an elastic system far enough, and it’ll either snap or spring back in ways that you might not expect.
No one saw the need to switch from HTTP to HTTPS until the Snowden leaks showed the games they were playing with that. sproing a major shift to HTTPS
No one cared about phone security until law enforcement saw them as piggy banks to raid on the slightest pretext. sproing Now they “can’t do their jobs”.
No one cared about distributed social networks until lawmakers created a SESTA morality cannon with massive splash damage, and companies got caught collecting and selling (or renting) vast amounts of information on their users.
The sproing from the latest attempt to stop prostitution will be interesting.
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We have a fascinating set of double standards where sex-worker related sites are effectively banned - but hardcore pornography is a click away.
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Quite. Lawmakers need discreet ways for booking sex workers too.
Especially lawmakers of the holy roller strain.
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