I made PeerTube and Mastadon accounts today out of curiosity and was generally impressed. Mastodon especially is quite usable (though obviously many fewer users than Twitter), the interface is as good as Twitter (better if you count not spamming you to login). I posted about my open source project and other random stuff and got several thought out, kind, non-spam replies with a new account. I imagine this is because of the barrier to entry and that I made my account on a open source focused instance. If Mastodon/federated social networking became popular I imagine there could be "Eternal September" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) dynamics though.
I wonder if paradoxically federated communication would let you improve the quality of discourse by more proactively banning people. Mastadon works on a federated system where anyone can run they're own "instance" which can then interact with other instances pretty seamlessly. Since people really can leave if they don't like the rules you could be pretty heavy handed with moderation within individual instances to ban obnoxious people or have an invite only system.
PeerTube was a little rougher around the edges, but still very impressive for being pretty new and doing p2p video streaming. There was more lag than YouTube but with decent internet it's fine. The choices for instances aren't great and storage size and bandwith are limited. Storage/bandwith cost money though and that may just be making what's an invisible cost on YouTube visible.
If you want to connect your Twitter and Mastodon accounts and enable crossposting, have a look at this[0]. I also wrote a blog post[1] were I talk a bit about my migration experience.
I'm interested as well. How did you choose your PeerTube instance? What happens to the videos and followers if whoever runs peervideo.club stops what I assume is a side project of them?
This was the biggest problem with PeerTube. For Mastodon I clicked the big "join" button on the website and filtered by technology > foss and fosstodon.org was the largest option and seems to have a great community. For PeerTube trying to do the same thing I found some small technology instance with a few hundred videos. I chose peervideo.club because it's the 4th largest (so I'd be in good company if it's taken down) and seemed to be the largest English focused instance. From their about, "Peer Video Club is a chill PeerTube instance most likely just for testing. How long we plan to maintain this instance: ¯\(ツ)/¯. How we will pay for this instance: Owners's own funds". Doesn't seem like a pillar of stability.
My understanding is I could backup (no plans), and restore to another instance. To take my followers with me I would have to leave peervideo.club in a more planned way and set my account to redirect to another. No idea how long the redirect would have to stay up for most of my subscribers' instances to get the message. Even with federated you need some degree of trust that you won't be kicked off or have you instance shut down with no warning.
I don't know whether this also applies to ActivityPub, but with Matrix it's similar to e-mail. If you use an identifier supplied by your instance, you run into the issue of having to tell people your new address. If you use your own domain as an identifier, you can simply redirect it to another instance if you switch.
An Eternal September can easily be avoided by joining a small server with a community you like. I and others would recommend over a couple hundred but under a couple thousand.
As for improving discourse, I think you are exactly right. Unlike big tech Masto mods don't have the weight of the world on their shoulders and can moderate however. Nazi pits will still exist, but they'll be isolated.
Afaik, Gab doesn't use Mastodon anymore. They did start as a Mastodon instance, but after being blocked from most instances and even at the software level by most Mastodon apps, they stopped using Mastodon and I believe wrote their own new backend that does not federate.
Here's the commit that removes the Public/All timeline (the above image mentions that removal): https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-social/-/commit/7ad7fe06...
Couldn't find when exactly Federation capability was removed, since that's less obvious from the commit messages (as someone who doesn't know Mastodon internals).
It's still based on the Mastodon fork, but they seem to have been changing the code constantly even before this (based on information under #gab on Mastodon), so it's not clear how much it resembles the Mastodon source by now.
PS: Somehow looking at the source repo and commit messages makes this more "real" for me, more than any screenshots or the user-facing site itself. It's a weird feeling.
I wonder if paradoxically federated communication would let you improve the quality of discourse by more proactively banning people. Mastadon works on a federated system where anyone can run they're own "instance" which can then interact with other instances pretty seamlessly. Since people really can leave if they don't like the rules you could be pretty heavy handed with moderation within individual instances to ban obnoxious people or have an invite only system.
PeerTube was a little rougher around the edges, but still very impressive for being pretty new and doing p2p video streaming. There was more lag than YouTube but with decent internet it's fine. The choices for instances aren't great and storage size and bandwith are limited. Storage/bandwith cost money though and that may just be making what's an invisible cost on YouTube visible.
My Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@argosopentech
My PeerTube: https://peervideo.club/video-channels/argosopentech/videos