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0 pointsHamcha3y ago0 comments

They might try, but the beauty is that in most instances the leadership is not motivated by engagement metrics and advertisements but just people wanting to stick together. Kinda like the glory days of IRC.

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dredmorbius3y ago

That works so long as:

- Small instances can still participate and engage. "Personal Mastodon server" might very much go the way of "personal email server", in a world of majors (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, etc.)

- Instances aren't acquired. One of the insidious aspects of capitalism is that firms can buy other firms. Yes, it's possible for a competitor to emerge, but a large established giant can buy out that competitor. Or take other actions, e.g., lock out any entity which supplies or interacts with that competitor. See former "Facebook killer" Ello.co (post-acquisition its new owners are exceedingly opaque and all the B Corp language has disappeared), or Mastodon instance Mastodon.cloud, acquired from its original owner by a Japanese concern.

- Management doesn't otherwise change.

- The operators don't simply diasappear (Joindiaspora.com, mastodon.cafe), or die (pluspora.com).

I AM a fan of Diaspora* and Mastodon. But I'm not blind to their actual and theoretical failings.

HamchaOP3y ago

Here's my counterpoints:

- I always found the big problem with small email servers was the setup (ask your friends how easy it is to spin one up), not the rest. I run my own mail server and haven't had problems in years, plus Mastodon and Pleroma are much much easier to run.

- I've experienced the "instance is dead, pls migrate" pain, but thankfully it's been getting wayyy better, some of my follows have migrated and I just got a nice notification going "hey X migrated to Y" with the follow updated to the new address. This makes the platform much less of a walled garden than your Twitter/Facebook of today.

I understand the downsides of the platform, but I genuinely think they are a bit overblown. Meanwhile everyone keeps thinking of AP as a strict Twitter replacement without understanding all the possibilities that federation unlocks (esp. with the integration with different but compatible services like Peertube/Writefreely) and how those extra integrations would push everyone to keep their doors open.

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