Mastodon is getting traction. Good and bad.
On the front page of the BBC website I see an article about Mastodon:
That is great, but also not so.
It is fantastic that more people are joining the fediverse, but I am concerned and annoyed about a couple of things:
A. Popularity gets polluted
In a world where trade is the main activity for humans (jobs, money, data collection, all that crap), the more people will join, the more of these charlatans will, who want to promote their own shit on the platform. After all a lot of accounts on Twitter/Facebook are made for companies and to sell shit. They will start to do that on the Fediverse. Watch out!
B. Musk should not be the reason
If people move to the fediverse because of Musk, this is not ok. If they were not put off by Twitter’s ads, control, data collection, and centralization in the first place, then they have no clue what really fucks things up in this world. Is not just billionaires, it is the system making them and all of the above fuckery. So if platforms are trade-based: they ask you something in return (money, data, other currencies, attention, etc.) then this platform is a dangerous one. But I doubt most people understand that.
C. Misunderstanding about Mastodon/Fediverse
It is a great shame that people who write about this network only focus on Mastodon and do not understand how this works. That BBC article does make it look like the network is Mastodon. But that’s gravely wrong. There are plenty of networks, some a lot more feature-rich than Mastodon. I understand, for newcomers can be confusing, but for one the more you talk about it the less confusing it becomes, and second if you do not talk about this then you completely dismiss the power of the federated network and its decentralized nature.
For example, if they were to recommend Friendica (which I use and provide a public instance of) then they could have mentioned that Friendica connects with Twitter too, and you can bring all of your friends in a second to Friendica, from Twitter. Get their posts in Friendica, reply to them, get notifications and all that. MUCH easier to come from Twitter to Friendica! Also Friendica is so feature-rich…and works with any Mastodon app….
D. Concentration is bad for federation
Speaking of promoting only Mastodon, they basically talk about 2-3 instances when they make these articles. Now people flock there, and we have a situation in which very few instances have most users…these instances are so powerful now. @Eugen 💀 and others should have not accepted more than say 100.000 users or less on their instances. This is so bad I can’t explain. It means ONE single human can destroy connections and fuck things up for hundreds of thousands on the fediverse. Terrible!
Also this fuckery from the BBC article:
My god…the “donation” practice has been entirely corrupted nowadays isn’t it? If admins ask for donations that’s entirely different from someone asking you for money in order to get access to their network. A donation won’t get you anything in return. This is why our struggle at TROM to explain why trade is essential to understand. Something is not free when you have to trade for it in return of getting that thing.
So, BBC:
- If I have a Mastoton instance and say “You pay me 10$ a month and then you can join” then that’s not free. You have to trade 10$ in order to join the network.
- If I say “You join but you need to watch these ads that you cannot disable” then it is not free. I want your attention. So you trade your attention in order to join the network.
- If I say “You can join the network but I collect data about you to make a profit off of it”….you guessed it, it is not freee. You traded your data for accessing the network.
However: if I say “You can join my network. I do not want anything from you. But if you want to donate you can.” Then it is FREE. No trade. You can or cannot donate. And you can still join the network.
K? 😁
Now welcome to the fediverse, not mastodon!
