Darkfriend Social Updates

Here at the end of 2024, a little more than two years after opening Darkfriend Social, it's time to have a little talk about the future. Also time to share the monthly funding update.

I want to get the funding update out of the way real quick.

Previous balance: $0 Donations received: $6.00 Monthly fees: $19.00 Covered by me: $13

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Remaining: 0

With that out of the way, I have some potentially bad news. It's been two years since I started up Darkfriend Social as a potential landing place in the open social web for Wheel of Time fans that may choose to abandon Twitter. I now plan to shutdown Darkfriend Social on March 14th of 2025. If there is an interest from one of our active users to take the site over I'm willing to entertain that and look into what steps would be needed.

Below, I explain the major driving factors in this decision.

Mission Failure

The unfortunate truth is that this has been largely a failure. While there was a fair bit of activity in the first month, that userbase moved back to Twitter pretty quickly. Darkfriend Social has most recently been home to around 5 active users, give or take on some months. To many on the fediverse this probably doesn't seem like a problem. There are plenty of servers out there housing only a single user. But the goal was a larger userbase than this. I have come to accept that isn't going to happen. Also, as I'll go into a little further below, I think that was probably a bad goal from the start.

Funding

$20 a month is not an onerous expense overall, and there have been times in the last two years where donations from members have covered the monthly costs entirely. I have been and continue to be grateful for every donation. We are getting to a point, however, where our monthly costs are likely to increase. As many compromises as have been made, our server database size will always have an upward trend and we've been flirting with getting bumped to the next level of hosting (we host with Masto.host). That would take us from $19 a month to $29 a month. If we continue to operate it is a certainty that we will hit this point.

I want to be clear at this stage that this is not just a long-winded way of asking for more donations. Funding is only one of the factors, and honestly not the most important one. I am not asking for donations at this time, and intend to cancel recurring donations being made to our Ko-Fi.

Government Regulation

Governments around the world are getting involved in online social spaces and content moderation. It seems like every couple of months there's a new push to add more requirements and bureaucracy, allegedly aimed at restraining the power of Big Tech but actually only helping to solidify those companies as the only viable players in the space.

In March of 2025 the UK's Online Safety Act will go into effect. Russ Garrett was kind enough to write up Online Safety Act Notes for Small Sites. Put simply, I just don't have the bandwidth to absorb all of this and add stressing over compliance with this and similar laws.

This is the primary factor for my decision.

Philosophical: Small Fedi vs Big Fedi

Small Fedi vs Big Fedi is the debate over which is the preferred model. It seems like a common voiced stance is that there should be more small servers out there because that means more decentralization. This view seems to favor decentralization over other priorities. I have personally shifted to the opinion that what we actually need is more big servers and services.

The small fedi experience is a fundamentally compromised one due to the way these services work. Network fragmentation is inherent in the design and the smaller your server the greater the issue. While there are relays out there to try to help deal with this, that opens you up to increased costs per user.

More big fedi would also mean servers that are better equipped to deal with the shifting political and legal landscape. While there are more responsibilities for large service providers, they are much more likely to have the time and funding to put into meeting those requirements. Also those efforts will serve a greater percentage of the network as a whole.

There is also just a whole lot of duplication in the small fedi model. Duplication of data, often duplication of users who create multiple accounts on multiple servers either through confusion or intentionally to try to address some of the compromises. This also comes into play with funding and administration. The more users there are on a large server the lower the costs per user, and the more efficient the admin time is spent.

I am more convinced now that what the fediverse needs is more large servers and services. In addition to the previous points, the average person just wants to experience a social network with as few compromises as possible. Small servers just don't meet the threshold in my opinion.