Mastodawn

PCMag Apr 18, 2023

Here's an incomplete and unscientific explanation of why Mastodon is safe from Elon-style shenanigans, according to one of our writers. https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/whats-happening-to-twitter-could-never-happen-to-mastodon

What's Happening to Twitter Could Never Happen to Mastodon

An incomplete and unscientific explanation of why Mastodon is safe from Elon-style shenanigans.

PCMAG

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Jeff Moe Apr 18, 2023

@PCMag

To attack, the attackers will want Mastodon to consolidate. Powers will want few servers they need to exploit.

Small tech companies will launch "friendly" "easy-to-use" proprietary Mastodon instances, which will look community friendly. They will buy up communities that they can.

Major tech companies will embrace, extend, and extinguish to kill off large sections of the network.

"Figures playing games", will continue, cf: I Hunt Sys Admins

https://theintercept.com/document/2014/03/20/hunt-sys-admins/

I Hunt Sys Admins - The Intercept

Fearless, adversarial journalism that holds the powerful accountable.

The Intercept

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Scott Robbins Apr 18, 2023

@jebba @PCMag This is a good point.

Mastodon likes to be compared to email, and I think it’s a good comparison.

Google attempted the same thing with Gmail, and was pretty successful. Outlook probably controls the other large portion of emails for businesses.

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Jeff Moe

@scottrobbins @PCMag

Yes, email is a great example.

They just flooded email with junk so people would consolidate.

For years, nearly all spam was from (easily) exploited windows workstations spammers compromised. This helped Microsoft and Google.

Yet admins weren't allowed to fight back. I could have written a script to power off every Windows machine that hit my servers that I knew was compromised. But that would have been illegal. So one just had to sit there and be attacked.