Mastodawn

Luke LeBrun Nov 18, 2022

The collapse of Twitter for (basically) self-inflicted reasons makes a strong case for building online infrastructure structured as a non-profit or public utility.

People rely on these platforms for public information, use them for democratic debate and many invest their livelihoods in them.

These platforms are too important to public safety, peoples’ livelihoods and democracy to leave in the hands of eccentric billionaires or the whims of stock markets.

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David Grubb

@llebrun Part of the solution is to shift from platforms to protocols. Centrally run massive platforms (ala Twitter & FB) aggregate too much power; whether into private or gov't hands. Also, they are inherently fragile. By standardizing on protocol (ala email and Mastodon) we can avoid any entity gaining too much power via aggregation of the attention. Also, a protocol based approach is anti-fragile in that local failures don't threaten the "platform" and the ecosystem supports innovation.