Mastodawn

@Mastodon You are now competing with other providers of these services while you are the developer of the software, too. So there is an incentive to keep your competition down. You’ll use software and/or documentation to achieve that.
And when the first lawsuits about lacking moderation drop, buying “proper” moderation will be considered the only responsible way to operate a server.
This is the way to centralize the fediverse. It’s a bad decision.

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@chris
> You are now competing with other providers of these services

One of the 4 core pillars of enshittification prevention. Interoperating with competing software. That's 2. Full source code available under libre license, enabling self-help. That's 3. HQ in Germany, in a jurisdiction actively regulating tech services, that's all 4. Sounds like an ideal tech market to me.

@Mastodon

Strypey

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@chris
> while you are the developer of the software too

Like WordPress, GitLab, Element, Loomio, Snikket, and innumerable others, who have served as good stewards of a libre codebase, while selling services based on it, to keep core dev sustainable.

Contrast this with Oracle and LibLime, who tried to ...

> use software and/or documentation to achieve that

... to ...

> keep [the] competition down

... with OpenOffice and Koha respectively, and got ruthlessly forked and routed around.

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I'm less worried about Mastodon Inc. hosting services for other people, than I've been about them running overpowered directly. Which has lead to Mastodon being optimised for "enterprise" scale, rather than a scale which is practical to moderate with nuance.

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@chris
> when the first lawsuits about lacking moderation drop

Mast. Inc. will be screwed. Their moderation is famously inadequate, due the aforementioned supersizing of the services they run.

> buying “proper” moderation will be considered the only responsible way to operate a server

The idea that anyone would buy that from Mast. Inc. under any circumstances is deeply laughable (see above).

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You're not wrong that bullshit accusations of "inadequate moderation" is an attack surface enemies of the fediverse could potentially use. But I can't see how it logically follows from Mastodon offering a managed hosting service.

Again, Mastodon are in the EU, where the courts still enforce basic civil rights. I'd be much more worried if their HQ was in the US, where much more serious governments crackdowns on media freedom have been going on since Dubya, if not longer.

@strypey While I agree that we’re better off in #EU I’m not too optimistic. Search for #ChatControl

@strypey I bet that part of the business plan is growing the moderation team of the central mega instances (that are too big to block) and to refinance this by reselling moderation as a service.
The mega instances see most of the traffic and reselling moderation comes at about zero additional cost since moderation will be done anyways.
(That does not even look like a bad or nefarious decision on the first look!)

@strypey The Wordpress / Automattic drama is an excellent example for _one_ of the things I’m expecting to happen.

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@chris
> The Wordpress / Automattic drama is an excellent example for _one_ of the things I’m expecting to happen

You seem to be presupposing that WordPress is the bad guy in their conflict with WP Engine. I've yet to be presented with anything substantial to support that view. It seems to be a case of shoehorning the judgement into the theory, without bothering to check that the facts actually fit either.

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Again, you're ignoring Mastodon interoperating with other software. The WordPress case is totally different.

You're ignoring the freedom to fork. If WP Engine are the target of Bad Action, what's stopping them just forking WP and ignoring Automattic? Lots of people would probably jump on their fork the same way they're jumping to conclusions about who's at fault.

You're also ignoring the fact that both companies in the WP conflict have their HQ in the *US*, not the EU. Very different.