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The Fediverse is a great idea, but tbh there’s a lot about the current generation of apps that is centralised in other ways that will doubtless compromise them later. As we can see from how even instance mods can behave, any concentration of power at all can and will lead to fief building. The aim should be to allow the network paradigm to have enough plurality and redundancy to outlive such politicking.
I’d encourage people to read the article, because it’s pretty no-nonsense and has some other interesting details and background information. It’s not very long, either!
But here’s the important part that the headline speaks of:
Decentralized social network organization Mastodon said Monday that it is planning to create a new non-profit organization in Europe and hand over ownership of entities responsible for key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means one person won’t have control over the entire project. The organization is trying to differentiate itself from social networks controlled by CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
While exact details are yet to be finalized, this means that Mastodon’s current CEO and creator, Eugen Rochko, will hand over management bits of the organization to the new entity and focus on the product strategy.
It also differentiates it from Bluesky. It was just Twitter’s endeavor to spearhead decentralization, just like Threads. Jay Graber has Bluesky’s users by the balls and at their whims just like Musk has Twitter. Anything proprietary and for profit will always eventually enshittify. Threads was born already enshittified and Bluesky is on the early part of the curve.
Nothing of substance to add, but for the record Jay Graber is a woman
It isn’t proprietary though. You can run your own instance. Not decentralised atm but nothing indicating they aren’t pushing towards that.
It is proprietary, only the Authenticated Transfer protocol is open. Thus far saying it is decentralized is a controversial topic, depends on the definition of dencentralization. A regular user can only hope to host a Personal Data Server, without any real or consequential power over the network, though. Relays are not practical to be hosted by anyone but huge companies. And even then, the content and data is still under absolute power of Bluesky.
For example, if a Mastodon server decides to censor something and you don’t agree with said decision, you can change servers and still access the content and participate on the Activity Pub stream. But, if BlueSky decides to censor you or someone else, you are out of luck. Even if you host you own server, the canonical repository of the network activity is under absolute power of BlueSky.
You could host your own AT network, but it is not clear how or even if it will be able to interact with other AT networks or the canonical BlueSky network.
Here’s some sources:
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization
https://next.ink/158967/bluesky-est-il-decentralise/
https://tormentnexus.substack.com/p/is-bluesky-really-decentralized-its
imo bsky is not 100% of what we want, but it has roads out of their system… its not decentralised exactly, but you can build bridges and that’s super important
the main reason people stay with facebook, twitter, reddit, etc is what’s called the “network effect”. for social media, it’s hyper important to get people onto the platform, otherwise it’s not social (reddit and lemmy a bit different: you still need a self-sustaining amount of people, but the more you get to the “people you know” platforms, the more you need as close to everyone you can get to keep people there)
now, twitter, facebook, instagram, etc have no functionality to allow people off-platform to contact people on-platform (and visa versa), so if you leave the platform you loose all those connections - the first people to move have a terrible experience because the platform is pretty much useless (there’s no social in the social media)
bsky at least changes that part so now we can bridge: bsky users can interact with mastodon users, which means that in the future it’ll be much easier for people to make the choice to leave, if they choose to: they don’t have to give up the creators they follow, or family and friends… there might be a slightly degraded experience, but i’d argue that’s pretty negligible
heck, i’d even prefer to trade twitter for threads at this point: imo facebook as a whole company is worse that twitter, but threads at least allows that off-ramp
if facebook itself were federated, who knows maybe one of these days i could convince my parents to move to friendica
Relay only costs a few hundred to run, regular people are already doing this. Also have Jetstream as a lightweight alternative.
Barrier is running your own AppView, but people working on that:
https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
The lack of decentralisation atm is not inherent and reflects the early growth stage. If they started to act like wanks there’d be a greater push to fork and build up parallel instances. Last I checked they were still working on improving the scalability of the protocol before building it out.
@fne8w2ah @technology
The important thing here is this avoids what happened with (and sorry i have to mention this ) #wordpress where one guy personally ran the org that guided the development of the software and then created dependencies on a central site he personally owns to control updates and access to plugins
Ownership of #trademark terms are important and open structures for things like.joinmastodon.org is as well
In the past few months, the ownership of open-source projects has been a recurring news subject. For instance, people have questioned control of certain WordPress community projects being in the hands of WordPress’s co-creator Matt Mullenweg. Mastodon is trying to avoid situations where only one person has decision-making powers with today’s new structure.
The steps taken linking Mastodon > Fediverse > Wordpress > Matt Mullenweg makes sense and is the kind of publicity/damage control the platform needs to get ahead of.
The blog post noted that the new Europe-based nonprofit entity will wholly own the Mastodon GmbH for-profit entity. The organization is in the process of finalizing the place where the new entity will be set up.
could this be cause for concern down the line? i mean this as a genuine question. i don’t really know how these things work. my understanding is some weird non-profit and profit mixture is what led to problems at openAI. but that said, i also know that the people at the company make a difference, and sam altman is very likely much worse than the mastodon CEO. anyways, it would be nice to know more about this relationship between the profit and non profit side of things.
Iirc, Mozilla has a similar structure and it causes some problems with donations
This is an encouraging development. Decoupling development from server management will help level the playing field.
This is good news and will affect its dozens of users.
I know you meant it in jest, but I think the last I saw, it was at 9mil and growing steadily.
And TBH, that relative lack of general attention is probably a good thing. Too much growth too fast could swamp or sink some instances.
Regardless of user numbers, it seems DEAD there. I go out looking for content and can’t find anything worth sticking around for.
If you follow hashtags, and you’re a big frickin’ nerd, Mastodon actually has pretty good content.
I follow lots of cool stuff but also notice that none of that cool stuff gets any sort of interaction whatsoever. That’s because discoverability is shit. Search is broken. The only thing that gets any sort of attention is TRUSK BAD.
BSky has the right idea with user-configurable/sharable algorithms. So there are still algorithms, but you the user are entirely in control of them.
I tried searching my interests of hockey, guitar, and recording music. There were a few things, but not much. I don’t have the highest expectations either. I know we are in the Fediverse.
Yep. The “big frickin’ nerd” part carries my statement pretty hard.
Homelab, videogames, Linux stuff… Content for miles.
Lol. I get it. I play COD and Apex Legends. =C
Be the change you want to see, man. I lurk on mastodon and love hockey. Surely we’re not the only ones (bit of a do as I say, not as I do moment on my part lol)
Have you tried doing things like following hashtags? That’s the best way to find content, I’ve found. If you write your own comments, you should also use hashtags so people can find you.
None of that will happen by default, and there’s no algorithm that will do that for you.
I’ll try.
There’s dozens of us! Oh wait, yeah.
