Amy C.Apr 10, 2017
It's boring to frame Mastodon as a Twitter usurper and much more interesting to think of it as an experiment for techno-socialism.
While users don't "buy" Twitter, Twitter sells user data to companies looking to make a profit off of users. People who have the means to create or support Mastodon instances provide the "service" for free. $ and tech skills get re-distributed to a wider community. Nothing and nobody is bought and sold.
Show threadJ Davis
@amy @nolan
I have a question about buying and selling user data: is that a mastodon thing? or an instance thing? Like, if @nolan was suddenly overcome by greed, could he legally sell our data from his instance? (provided he buries the fact that he is going to do so in some legal text)? If that question seems like I am uneducated on this type of thing, that is an accurate portrayal.
Apr 10, 2017 at 5:02pmWeb
Show threadAmy C.Apr 10, 2017
@supergoose @nolan It's up to each instance's admin whether or not they want to sell your data and whether or not they want to tell you that they are doing so. I'm not sure about the legality tho. That said, my impression is that the code doesn't have any easy tools for admins to do that and most admins are hobbyists in it for fun.