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.
