Like it or not, it should no longer be assumed that "volunteers" are running your instances.

The Mask Group, which now runs three large instances "has raised over US$50 million from private and institutional backers"—their words not mine.

There's going to be a massive land grab of all these big instances. There will be lots of merging and acquiring too.

My advice is that you all become *very* aware of who owns your instance and why.

Get to know your admins—make sure their values align with your own.

If you don't want to put your social media life in the hands of strangers, then self-host your own instance.

To everyone using mastodon.cloud and mstdn.jp: remember, you're not locked into those instances.

If you want, you can migrate elsewhere.

This is not Twitter—you have a choice regarding where your home will be on the Fediverse.

A warning: there's going to be a concerted effort to re-centralize the Fediverse.

As we've just seen with the acquisition of pawoo.net, that's already happening.

What are you going to do to thwart this trend?

@rob The instances that have gone bad have lasted for a very long time.

Technology does not replace human moderation.

@rob @atomicpoet That's a very naive stance. If you think bad things can't happen here, you probably wont be careful or vigilat and then they WILL happen.

Those "two button presses" can just be disabled. The instance can do stuff to attract many users and then just change the protocol step by step.

It's not the first time that would happen. And ignoring that threat won't just make it go away.