Four years ago I decided to run my own single-user Mastodon instance. Because I knew that staying at a Big Instance would make me part of the relevance sword that power-drunk admins would use to pump up their ego and claim relevance. And now I see at least one admin insinuating to be a stakeholder of the fediverse and thus entitled to represent The Fediverse in seemingly secret talks with Meta. #WhereIsMySurprisedFace
@jwildeboer The road goes from good intentions (someone set us up the... server) over misrepresentation (claiming generic/community tag domain names, making up house rules on behalf of the community) to corruption (dragging that misrepresentation thingy to contexts outside community matters).
@jwildeboer for this reason I'm not super happy about Fediblock. I know it makes an admin life easier, but it's centralization of power in the hands of a few.
I also observe other people trying to pump up their relevance by acting as loud and radical opponents, demanding the typical "if you are not with us, you are against us" to organise a preemptive defederation of META/Facebook and thus ultimately helping META to divide and conquer the fediverse.
And obviously soon the first tech media will report on this in the clickbait exaggerated way that is unfortunately typical nowadays.
At a time where we really should mainly stay calm and continue the growth of the fediverse in an active and respectful way so it becomes the default protocol for virtual communities and communication.
@jwildeboer but the weakness is that it will always involve personalities who feel pride, angst, power, the lack thereof and every other human emotion. I believe large instances run by single people or corporations should not exist. What we need is a community run system. Fedidemocracy.
@pjakobs Federation (especially with big instances capturing the user majority) has the risk of creating an oligopoly. Hence we need MORE decentralisation, baked into the protocol itself. Where users (and their data) can't be held hostage by admins. Decouple content from instances. Would also make full migration far less painful. Etc. I have been consistently suggesting this since many years.
@jwildeboer@pjakobs I think it is what Hubzilla (and the subsequents projects coming from it, Streams being the last one) achieves, or at least seeks to achieve (there is mirroring of accounts for backup and resistance on failure).
My main concern on Meta (well, the concern has always been there, as it can be any "nasty" instance, just we know they have nasty practices and are big) is : our messages would be parsed and analysed, how can we prevent this ?
@jwildeboer If Meta joins the Fediverse, it will split the Fediverse. Some like it, and others left Meta for good reason.
And Meta could conquer its half only.
@jwildeboer Thinking about Usenet in the 90s, Fediverse seems to have it's Compu$erve moment. Commercialized users and content pouring in, causing huge uproar.
What we can learn from these times: things will change significantly if business get's their foothold in the Fediverse ...
Compu$erve, AOL, Micro$oft, Google, Facebook ... By design, the Fediverse will not be able to counter this - being open is the core of it. So, the communities in there will have to find an answer.
@jwildeboer some people do it to help the community, others do it to feed their ego. I am glad that @jerry here isn't the same as other instance maintainers and admins.
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