Aral Balkan
I’m right in the middle of the move so I don’t have time to write anything at length on the whole “mastodon.social rolling out the red carpet for Threads/Instagram/Meta/Zuckerberg” thing.
In a nutshell:
- The *only* leverage the fediverse has over a trillion-dollar corporation is social legitimacy.
- That is exactly what the flagship instance is providing to Meta.
- It matters less whether your tiny/personal instance blocks them; given their size, you’re effectively blocking yourself.
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Aral Balkan
- The fact we have a flagship instance and that mastodon.social didn’t close signups ages ago is a huge part of the problem. They could have set a social precendent (large instances are a no-no) – they didn’t.
- When Threads federates, it will become the flagship instance.
- Eugen is basically handing the crown to Mark.
- The fact there is a crown to start with is a shortcoming of the federated model with instances that can scale indefinitely. (How else could things be done? See #SmallWeb)
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Aral Balkan
- This is classic embrace, extend, extinguish.
Clearly, some of you folks don’t know your classics. If you need a refresher, see this:
https://beehaw.org/post/719121
- We know the business model of Meta (people farming / surveillance capitalism). We know it’s toxic. We know that any publicly-traded trillion-dollar corporation plays a zero-sum game. There is nothing, nothing that justifies giving them the benefit of the doubt expect utter naïvety, verging on malicious negligence.
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Aral Balkan
All that said, it feels like this ship has already sailed.
The only person who can really make an impact here is Eugen – by taking a principled stance against Meta – and that’s clearly not what he’s doing.
Without that, we are witnessing the normalisation of Meta/surveillance capitalism on the fediverse.
The only time you have any power over a trillion-dollar corporation/VC-backed startup is at the start & your only real leverage is making it socially unacceptable. And we’ve surrendered that.
Aral Balkan
… As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always seen the fediverse as a useful bridge and more of means of reaching like-minded folks for what comes next.
In my mind, what comes next (not in that it will replace the fediverse or the web we have but in that it will exist alongside them) is the Small Web.
Think: everyone has their own “instance on one” (to borrow a fediverse term) in a peer-to-peer web that’s designed for that from the start.
Aral Balkan
… That’s what I’m working on and that’s what I see as one possible long-term solution.
But I do love the fediverse and I see a continued need for the fediverse and what I want to see will be harder to archive without the fediverse as a bridge so I would really love to see us not fuck it up or surrender it to the Zuckerbergs of the world.
I’ve said my piece.
Make of it what you will.
I don’t care to argue about it. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
And I’ve got boxes to pack before I’m done…
Aral Balkan
@matt Thanks, Matt! 💕
Matt 🌻
@aral Always interesting to hear your point of view. 🫶 And good luck with the move 🚛 📦
deutrino
@aral it's been my perception for five years or so that Eugen's primary goal is to maximize the portion (# of users, traffic, etc) of the Fediverse which *he* either directly controls or influences - The Mastodon Network™ - at the expense of everybody else. imo he wants a kingdom just like the more traditional social-tech ceo set clearly do, and I wish people would understand that
Aral Balkan
@jcolomb Thanks – to you too 💕
Julien Colomb
@aral good packing, thanks for being a voice of reason.
Happy christmas too.
Aral Balkan
@bobwyman It’s the difference between a community of individuals and a community of fiefdoms.
- Why do you think we would host Nazis? Avowed or otherwise. Our host will decide who to host and who not to host based on its own rules. Other hosts will choose to host based on theirs. If you want to you can self host by your own rules. None of this is rocket science.
- We would respond by removing the account. Why, how would you respond?
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Bob Wyman
@aral Why is "instance-of-one" different from instances-for-many?
- If you are hosting Kitten instances, will you host avowed Nazis?
- How will you respond if you find that you're hosting a Kitten instance that publishes child porn?
- How would a Kitten hosting service with 100 million instance-of-one's be better than a single instance serving 100 million accounts?
- An instance-for-many can efficiently share storage, operations, etc. in ways that an instance-for-one cannot. Does that matter?
Aral Balkan
- Domain is designed not to scale to those numbers. We don’t need 100s of millions of people to host to be sustainable. The only reason there’s even going to be a commercial aspect is because our societies are not smart enough to support such initiatives from the commons for the common good and we have to in order to have basic necessities like food and shelter. We do the best with the primitive societies we were born into.
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Aral Balkan
- Sharing storage is an optimisation that we will look into if it ever becomes an issue. I don’t think it will. Say you build a social app on the Small Web. You would design it so that if you share a 2GB movie, you do it on your own device. Unlike ActivityPub, you wouldn’t put that burden on every server that federates with you. People access anything you share from your server. They don’t make a copy of it (unless they want to).
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Aral Balkan
@suzantepas Thank you for bringing it to my attention but I’m not interested in proprietary software/services; especially when free and open alternatives exist.
Suzan
@aral Thank you for your input and information.
I wonder, do you know Spoutible?
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