There's misinformation floating around about Mastodon. Clarifying things:
1. Mastodon doesn't rely on volunteers. It's a registered non-profit that employs people. Kind of like how Wikipedia and Mozilla are non-profits that employs people.
2. Many instances are run by volunteers but not all.
3. Mastodon is just one part of the Fediverse. Benefits of decentralization is that anyone can build on open protocols.
4. Mastodon is big, but Flickr and Tumbler are bigger -- they're joining the Fediverse
@atomicpoet tumblr is adding mastodon interoperability?
Holy shit, that might be a straight up turning point for this network
@revolcom Correction: Tumblr is adding support for ActivityPub, which presumably will interoperate with Mastodon.
Mastodon is one part of the Fediverse.
@atomicpoet well yeah, was simply using shorthands.
But would that make tumblr one giant "corporate" mastodon server? Because if mastodon wants to thrive it will need a big ass server that could handle all the normies
@revolcom Who knows! Automattic owns Tumblr, and they're well known for WordPress -- which is usually self-hosted.
So perhaps this means in the future: Tumblr will be federated with many self-hosted instances.
Chris Trottier
hopeless wanderer
LinaB