Mike Masnick ✅Dec 21, 2022
I wrote about how I cannot understand why anyone is interested in joining a new centralized social media platform when we now have a great opportunity to move to protocols instead of platforms. https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/21/why-would-anyone-use-another-centralized-social-media-service-after-this/
Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This?

So, it’s been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media — and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet — the EU’s are coming into force shortly, but pos…

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Show threadMichaelDec 21, 2022

@mmasnick personally still expect that re-centralisation will ultimately occur, as it did with email, which is now dominated by a small number of big players, with self hosting almost impossible these days.

I did find these arguments quite compelling:

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/11/14/scaling-mastodon/

Hoping I’m wrong though.

Scaling Mastodon is Impossible

Now that Twitter is dying, what can replace it?

Show threadMike Masnick ✅Dec 22, 2022
@michael i'm not sure I see that as quite as big a problem. This is the nice bit of the federated model. The fact that *SOME* can create their own instances, or that if a "centralized" instance decides to do evil stuff, it's much easier to leave... creates a pretty good incentive structure. A centralized player comes in and makes it easy for end users who don't want complexity, but the rest keeps them from acting as an evil for the network.
Show threadMichaelDec 22, 2022

@mmasnick the problem is that that only works as long as ‘the rest’ is influential enough.

Once a big player controls a large enough percentage, I don’t think they’ll care about ‘the rest’

Show threadMike Masnick ✅
@michael we've seen it with Google and Gmail. The ability for people to leave has kept Google as a relatively "friendly" player in the space when it could have gone evil with Gmail (as it's done with other products).
Dec 22, 2022 at 9:14amWeb
Show threadMichaelDec 22, 2022

@mmasnick interestingly I feel the very opposite: it’s google and Microsoft’s insistence on filtering a large percentage of email from self hosters into spam, that makes self hosting email very difficult (not self hosting itself being difficult, but getting my self hosted emails into gmail and MS’s inbox is).

So to me it feels that the situation we’ve ended up in with regards to Google and Gmail is exactly what I’m afraid of happening with mastodon.