Andrew (Television Executive)Nov 18, 2022

Here's your irregular reminder that:

Twitter was a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees.

Mastodon is a niche hobbyist product run by volunteers

The fact that we're being seen as a viable alternative to them is an admission that a federated, decentralized future is not only possible, but desirable.

Mastodon is not one thing, or one place. It's a network of many things and many places. We don't have a spokesperson (I mean, there's me. I'm the official spokesperson for 💯 of the fediverse, but beyond me there is no spokesperson) we don't have consensus on moderation or blocking or tools or what is good and what is bad. Some of us are professional SREs and Sysadmins, some of us aren't. Some of our instances have been around for 5+ years, some won't be here in six months.

And that's good! All of it, every last bit of it is good.

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time, and reclaiming it for the People.

Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 18, 2022

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time.

This is bigger than some technical standard.

This is cultural, political, and economic.

We represent an existential threat to the business model of some of the most wealthy corporations on the planet, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone take that away from us without fighting against it with everything I have.

We are standing on the precipice of a transformative shift in the way we, as a society, relate to one another through the internet.

We are moving away from a Broadcast and Toward a conversation.

Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 18, 2022

This is mutual aid, this is anticapitalism, this is collaborative ideation.

We are living revolutionary values, right here, right now, on a silly little social media network.

And I will fight to my last breathe any God Damn corporation that tries to Monetize that.

This is the future, and you're a part of it now. Be a good steward of the future.

Show threadsj_zeroNov 19, 2022
I don't know that being against billionaires and corporations is
necessarily anticapitalism (private control of capital is what gives us the freedom to create our own websites), but besides that point I agree with everything you've written.

These megacorps have gotten too big for their britches, and they've forgotten we don't actually need them.
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@sj_zero I'm pretty sure that being against the capitalist class is the definition of anticapitalism.

Maybe your definition of capitalism differs from the common one, and somehow has grown to include all forms of ownership and commerce?

Websites wouldn't stop existing under socialism, and it's foolish or wildly misleading to pretend otherwise.

Show threadsj_zeroNov 19, 2022
Capitalism is usually defined as the private ownership and control of capital, as opposed to cooperative or state ownership and control of capital.

In my view, you don't need corporations to have capitalism. One of my more radical views is that we should get rid of corporations entirely, and then the owner of a thing would be personally responsible when their thing breaks things or people or the environment instead of letting a legal picture of Dorian Grey take the heat.
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
The liability protection is a net good, IMHO. Especially in the US where we have a judicial system that encourages litigiousness. I mean your local store owner needs it just as much as a giant pharmaceutical company. Yes, not corporations is still capitalistic, but without that construct, you wouldn't have a lot of industries. The risk just wouldn't be worth the reward.
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@midway @sj_zero If you can't sell pieces of a company, what's left to call capital? Productive property, machinery and the like, (which no individual could likely afford), land, and ... what?

What's there left to exploit without corporations?

Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
Twitter had a bad business model. That wouldn't matter if it were a corporation or a sole proprietorship. A corporation is simply a way to separate the financial liabilities from individuals running the company from the company itself. That doesn't mean that individual can't be held legally responsible for their individual actions while running the company, but there is sense in having a layer of separation there.

As far as the Fediverse replacing Twitter, I'm still skeptical. Yes, there is a bit of a run here by folks who were on Twitter. But I'll be interested to see how things look 2-3 years from now. I could just as easily see another big tech platform come along and be the next "hot" thing that people run to. I'm glad the Fediverse is getting exposure, but I'm not convinced it will catch on with the average person who just wants to share pictures of their family, pets, life, etc. and cyberstalk ex's. I am entirely open to being wrong here, but I think a lot of people will look and leave because it isn't like big tech. It's too different. For me, it's a great thing, but I never had a Twitter account in the first place and I have enough tech knowledge to run my own instance. That's not most people.
Show threadsj_zeroNov 19, 2022
I sort of hope you're right, tbh. I don't want or need the fediverse to become yet another oversaturated thing that everyone is using and suddenly everyone needs to control for our own protection.
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
I think the software is pretty good. But the dirty little secret is that the two largest instances using this software (forks of Mastodon) .... aren't federated. They are running closer to the traditional social media model. That says something about what people like.
Show threadJillianne Hamilton 📚
@midway can you explain what you mean by this? What are these two instances and why aren’t they federated?
Nov 19, 2022 at 9:29amWeb
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
@jillianne You can run Mastodon and its various forks without federation so they don’t talk to any other instances. The two giant instances that do this are Gab and Truth Social. Gab turned it off mostly for technical reasons. Federation wasn’t really built for super large instances (think multiple millions of users on one instance) was chewing up crazy amounts of resources which messed up their business model. Truth was most likely because that site wants to be ab echo chamber, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they would run into the same issue. But like then or not, and that’s not particularly relevant to this thread, those instances are much larger than mastodon.social and probably larger than the entire Fediverse at the moment. This software was really designed for lots of smaller instances, not giant monolithic ones. I see that as a feature rather than a flaw but if you are thinking in terms of a traditional social business model (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, et al) it can be an issue.
Show threadJillianne Hamilton 📚Nov 19, 2022
@midway I expected you to mention Counter Social since I believe it was born of a Mastodon instance as well. I didn’t realize those other platforms were too. Yikes.