sj_zero
Seeing people say "maybe mastodon can sell the platform to a bigger company" to me shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what exists here. It's like saying "maybe email can sell the platform to a bigger company"

It's like... You can't sell email as a platform, it doesn't belong to anyone to sell. Same with the fediverse.
Jan 10, 2023 at 10:46pmWeb
Show threadaresJan 11, 2023

@sj_zero

you're right, nobody can own the protocol, that's free and open source

but the seventeen thousand instances in the fediverse are dominated by a handful of very large instances

the top ten biggest instances account for about half of the users and activity on the network

and three of the top five are already controlled by one company, ominously named "mask network"

what would i do if i ran an evil corporation trying to extract for myself all the value created by millions of fedi people generously contributing their brainpower for free?

i'd emulate microsoft which wrote the book on how to extract profit from open protocols, and the title of the book is "embrace, extend, extinguish"