How Long Can Mastodon Resist Centralisation?

The "legacy" Mastodon network is unsafe and overly restrictive, and the mainstream will not force itself to unsee this in the way that the FOSS community has. If Eugen Rochko won't accommodate a centralised and consumer-focused mindset, he will ultimately be usurped as primary steward of the project.

It's the doorstep of summer, you wanna get fit for hols, and the media are recommending a new gymnasium chain. Everyone seems to be signing up. A couple of million people have joined in the past few weeks. So you follow suit. You go to the brand website and it gives you a few gym addresses to choose from. You select the nearest, fill in the signup form, then set off for your first workout.

But when you arrive, there's no reception, no staff, and the "workout area" is just a damp basement with a few weights strewn around. Said basement is actually the main living space for a renowned local creep known as Weird Willy, and it belongs, as I'm sure all creative writers will already be aware, to his mother. That's right, the intention here was that Weird Willy would sit watching while you did exercises in his mother's basement. You run. Obviously.

But what happens when you don't realise you're in Weird Willy's mother's basement? When you can't realise? When there are no visual triggers to prompt you to run? Enter Mastodon, an approximate virtualisation of the above. The decentralised concept of Mastodon allows your local neighbourhood creep to set up a server in his mother's basement, then promote it using the protocol's trusted brand.

Is the Fediverse Just Big Tech Subjugation in a Richard Stallman Wig?

"On inspection, the Fediverse showed itself to have most of the same problems as mainstream social media, and its mistreatment of users was both widespread and historically-ingrained. Some elements of the Fediverse were in fact worse than mainstream social."

It's hailed as the hero's arrow that might one day slay the monster of mainstream social media. Could it? I'll leave that one for others to answer. What I want to ask is: if the Fediverse did destroy the now openly hostile gang of megasilos, would it really make the world a better place? Is it any better than its centralised rivals? Is it even decentralised? We shall see. But let me prime this article with a nugget of philosophy...

Finding The Best Alternative Social Media Platform

What to look for and what to avoid when switching from Facebook or Twitter to another social network.

Photo by Kyra (@kepreston) on Unsplash. [image modified]

So you’ve had enough of Facebook’s not-so-secret stalking and force-feeding, and Twitter was never anything more than your stop-gap. You know there are plenty of other huge social networks. But these are either publisher-based (i.e. Instagram expects photos and YouTube expects videos), or niched, like LinkedIn, or glorified discussion forums, a la Reddit. So where do you go as a direct alternative to Facebook or Twitter?

If celebrities are not interested, that platform won’t go mainstream. If they are, it will.

The range of smaller platforms vying to straightforwardly replace the big two is vast. But virtually none of these head-on challengers are directly comparable to the biggies. No smaller network can compete with Facebook or Twitter like for like. They don’t have the money, the userbase or the cultural presence. They know they’re not going to prize people away from Facebook if, for example, their policies are broadly the same as Facebook’s. G+ proved that not even the mighty Google had the clout to do that. So what smaller networks and new entrants do is trade on being “different”. Common marketing points include…