Totally agree with Cory. Todayβs βAIβ may or may not be useful to you or your company, but there is no way that it is financially sustainable. And giving the sheer outrageous magnitude of money involved, when the crash comes β and it will β it will likely be worse than any other crash weβve ever seen.
From: @npub1fdrp...lvhs
I'm fascinated to (re-?)discover that the core #ActivityPub deliverable was the C2S API, not the S3S federation protocol.
Was the underlying assumption that servers were boring, one/few implementations could handle all cases, and innovation was going to be centered around clients?
What would it cost to run the #fediverse at scale? With billions instead of millions of users?
What does it cost to run a social network anyway? According to the annual reports of two companies that should know, the comparable seems to be about $1-$2 per user per month. And that's after stripping out a bunch of costs, like us not building ad tech in the fediverse.
Have better numbers? I'd love to see them!
From a recent talk of mine:
βMastodonβs developers β many of whom were queer and trans β did not enjoy the privilege of living the totally open life: they needed privacy and safety, means to protect themselves from harassment.β
Which led to particular choices that were made for #ActivityPub. Good ones imho.
1/2
"these problems may be rooted in the very architecture of social media platforms: networks that grow through emotionally reactive sharing. If so, improving online discourse will require more than technical tweaks β it will demand rethinking the fundamental dynamics of interaction and visibility that define these environments."
Fellow social media innovators: Should we accept the challenge from this paper? https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03385
