@feditips Can this scale? Could the Fediverse handle 3 billion unique users?

@feditips Social media moderation is one place where A.I. is going to take over. It seems inevitable.

@feditips On my server, it's just me, but in fairness, I am completely ungovernable.

@feditips Or, in some cases, nonhuman moderators (like animals and such). Not everyone is human!

@feditips “The current total number of employees of *any kind* at Facebook/Meta is only 77,114.” —

According to https://the-federation.info, the #Fediverse has currently a bit less than 24,000 nodes and therefore approximately the same number of node administrators. Most of them do the administration only part-time, but nevertheless, if we count them as employees of an imaginary “Fediverse Corporation”, this makes the Fediverse quite a big entity and of the same order of magnitude as some social media companies.

This is why I view it as misleading when for example #Mastodon is described as a small project, just because the Mastodon gGmbh consists of less than a handful of people.

@feditips But moderation is usually outsourced, so the employees moderating are not part of Facebook/Meta.

@feditips
Not sure how meaningful this stat is, though.

A moderator on Facebook is a moderator. There's always bureaucratic overhead, but that's what they do for a living.

OTOH a "typical" instance-level mod on the Fediverse prob also has other technical roles & a full-time day job. Parts of that are likely to be true even up to multi-thousand user instances.

I get the idea, 'all bugs are shallow with enough eyes' - but that too is problematic, since it ignores derivatives of Brooks' Law.

@feditips I remember reading that Facebook was farming out content moderation to offices in the Phillipines, and that some of the stuff they had to look at was so sick and dark that employee turnover was brisk due to the consequences to mental health of the moderators.