thumperI’m over here now, too. I’m an equal opportunity “let’s get the fuck off Twitter” kind of guy.
SunLocked@thumper Honest question, because I am also frustrated with the current situation: We got screwed by Tumblr, by Twitter, by WordPress.com… Is there any hope that another commercial platform will be any different?
Personally, I don’t trust any of them anymore. That’s why I will stay here until I find something, which is both, better and free (uncommercial).
@SunLocked Bluesky’s not commercial. They’re trying to create a protocol like Mastodon (and also compatible with Mastodon). But it’s easier to use and way more laid back than Mastodon. I dunno what’s going to happen but people simply aren’t coming here and they are (as fast as the invites allow) going to Bluesky. So we’ll see.
@thumper I agree that they say they only develop the open protocol. But with seed investors pouring millions of $$$ into the company, they must believe there is money to be made.
Maybe they will play by the (open) rules. For now. But at some point someone will try to make more money out of it.
Too often, have we seen open source champions becoming (half-)closed in order to make more money, .e.g.
MariaDB, Red Hat (IBM),...
I would be surprised if the same was not happening with BlueSky in a few years.
Some references:
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109213/open-source-uproar-as-mariadb-goes-commercial.html
@SunLocked That’s all fine but Mastodon isn’t going to be the next thing. It’s not getting traction due, IMO, to too much friction. It’s too hard to sign up, to hard to post, too hard to find and follow, too hard to discover content, and the user base makes all of it harder. Fact is, Twitter’s biggest problem right now is it’s owned by a wannabe Nazi. The content kinky and sex positive folks want to post is perfectly fine there as it’s always been. I doubt that’ll change ever. So being commercial is not the problem at all. That’s a red herring, imo.
@thumper You are right: Commercial or not is not the main question. But business model is.
Mastodon is not so much different from e.g E-Mail. I shy Gmail because I deeply mistrust Google. I rather pay a web/mail hoster for providing this service, including basic features such as anti-spam. This could work for the Fediverse, too. A hoster offering your private but managed instance.
And yes, Mastodon has its fair share of issues. But without having looked into the details, I have the impression that the underlying ActivityPub protocol could be the basis for many more solutions. Maybe even for a new Twitter replacement. With the benefit that that future solution could immediately tap into the network that the Fediverse already is. Hoping…