Interesting article by an AWS engineer who has set up a single user Mastodon instance on AWS
“Twitter rival Mastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform’s non-profit status.”
And what do those venture craps think that they’ll be buying?
- The software is open source.
- The company doesn’t own the instances.
- Mastodon isn’t the only fish in the fediverse.
There will be some awkward and ugly attempts by people who want to own the next Facebook/Twitter.
Do they ever understand what they’re buying?
ETA: I expect that there will be a run of private companies trying to spin up Mastodon instances, putting in ads, and trying to create commercial businesses
Which no one will federate with…
This would actually be a good thing, really. What if, say, Nike ran their own Mastodon instance? You wouldn’t have to worry about spoofing! PR types and other employees could use the official Nike Mastodon for work stuff, and some other instance for private spouting off. Or the New York Times could be running its own instance for all of its columnists and reporters, and not worry about being censored on other instances.
Really, the level of trust currently applied to individual accounts could just as easily be applied to entire instances once companies realize they can own their own instances, enforce their own rules for what is acceptable, and so on. Nike could be lax, allowing for all sorts of sports and athleisure talk, and regulate what is posted and who is allowed in more easily because it’s not an open plaza, it’s a Nike store you set your soapbox up in.
EDIT: I forgot to go into your whole “which no one will federate with” line, because that’s the other part, that users ought to be able to mix and match their own fediverse, more like RSS feeds than whatever the server decides is allowable. It shouldn’t devolve into “ah, but we are Adidas fans, and refuse to let Nike posts dirty our servers!”
A list of special interest instances. Signing up or transferring to a particular instance isn’t required. You can browse the server to see if there’s anyone worth following.
But wait, there’s more!
And once there are common protocols and a user base, people will build add-ons or new software to try out weird ideas.
McArdle is a Libertarian political and economics pundit (not a tech expert) who wants yet another closed-source centralised platform run by yet another billionaire tycoon she can worship. Hence the FUD. The idea of an open-source social media ecosystem that isn’t ad-supported and that doesn’t have an algorithm that surfaces the most outrageous posts of her far-right allies* must be a terrifying one for her.
[* and indeed one that allows entire instances that tolerate such people to be turned into banned pariah servers.]
… sort of a breezy take, but digging that the trickiness-of-monetization aspect is getting more boost.
Also the protocol angle - as networks and devices evolve, the implementations can too - keeping it resilient against re-centralization
Hmph. Medium can be its own enshitification walled garden at times.
How to add more verification bling to your Fedverse id.
Is she still a Randroid? She used to blog under the moniker “Jane Galt”, if memory serves.
ETA: point being, I weigh the advice from non-tech Libertarians about What The Internet Needs less than, say, professionals.
I recently saw a comment but can’t find it (Mastadon? the bbs?) to the effect of “Libertarians are the anti-vaxxers of economics. They think the stability and order is natural.”
“The first hit is free.”
A good list of other Fediverse platforms.
Also good to know:
eta:
How to self-verify yourself and get a checkmark without paying Musk a dime.
This is for Friendica, but it should be similar for other Fediverse platforms.
https://wiki.friendi.ca/docs/verify_homepage
Step 1: Put a link to your profile on your “homepage”, with a rel=“me” tag.
Step 2: Enter the Homepage URL into your profile.
Homepage is your blog or whatever page out on the net that’s about you. (I was just going to create a page on my site, but maybe I’ll try adding a link from my BB, GitHub or Slashdot profiles.)
With both ends pointing at each other, you’ll be marked as verified.
