James 🚫Apr 10, 2017
Amy C.
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.
Apr 10, 2017 at 4:56pmWeb
Show threadNolan LawsonApr 10, 2017
@amy yes absolutely, I think anyone who has read something like The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu will know exactly what Mastodon is the alternative to 🙂
Show thread⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️Apr 10, 2017
@amy A while back, there was the idea of a 'dotcommunist'. Never was quite sure what it meant, but the phrase was memorable.
Show threadMoKeApr 10, 2017
@amy what I like more it's the fact that this is community supported. Thus, it can evolve as the community wishes.
Show threadJ DavisApr 10, 2017
@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.
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.
Show threadMatt CotterApr 10, 2017
@amy Good points but is there any guarantee that later on that people *couldn't* use Mastodon in this manner that you're aware of?
Show threadAmy C.Apr 10, 2017
@virt there is NO guarantee that people won't do that. buuuut I don't think there are any tools in the Mastodon codebase that would let admins mine user data. Data mining infrastructure *could* be built, but that requires significant investment and I think almost all instance admins are hobbyists.
Show threadcrwApr 10, 2017
@amy agree that it's not so helpful to compare to twitter. need to figure out how/why federated micro-blogging via mastodon is different than federated IM via XMPP. this feels like an experiment that's already kinda been done - can anything be learned from that history and applied to the present?
Show threadChris Silverman 🌻Apr 10, 2017

@amy I think this model also makes a difference as far as incentive to get rid of troublemakers. If your business model relies on attracting advertisers by telling them you have X million users, you might not want to do anything that will lower that number.

A distributed service based on people contributing time/tech out of principle receives no benefit from trolls—unless trolling is the point—and is more likely to recognize that trolling hurts the community.