There’s four possible legal structures that could be behind a messaging service:
- political domain (state, city, …)
- corporate entity (typically for-profit)
- clubs (typically non-profit)
- individual humans
I think it fits the spirit of the Fediverse best to consider the lower two options. A club is a free get-together of humans for some purpose, such as sports club, literature club, you could have a Fediverse club. I highly support this approach, because it is non-profit-oriented, lives off donations, and is rooted by responsible individuals who do something good for the community. Also, individual humans can host smaller instances, but as the instances grow in size, having multiple people behind it to back it up could make things more stable over time.
Honestly a mix all four doesn’t seem bad to me. For example, a public library hosting an instance, or a for-profit research or reporting organization federating sounds unproblematic.
For-profit always has to be handled with care, but for example Flipboard hosts an instance and I haven’t seen any issues yet.
That’s where the “free market” should apply. You only use companies with the best practices, and when that company turns greedy, you go to another company. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Companies know that people will sacrifice quality for convenience. We just have to keep trying.
Agreed. Walled gardens are by virtue an anti-competitive tactic.
Social networking makes alternatives particularly difficult. The most important feature of any social network is that everyone uses it. The second best social network in a given niche is rarely worth talking about. After all, what good is a social network with no people?
Keep pushing forward and leaving behind the toxic “RTFM” culture that many free and open communities inherited from Unix culture. Mastodon is setting a great example by prioritizing user-friendly support guides and intuitive UX over opaque documentation of idiosyncratic design.
Failure from idiot Americans to move from tiktok to another corporate video platform and from Twitter to Blue sky . I’m done giving a shit about Americans today though, tired of laughing at their ineptitude.
idk mastodon gained like a million users this month it’s not as bad as you think
loops.video is still in infancy (no federation yet even) so i’m not too mad there isn’t massive success there yet
I see that, in addition to calling proprietary LLMs “”“open source”“”, we’re just calling everything that every company has done “”“open source”“” as well 😑
The closest thing they have to an accurate point is Android, but Google didn’t start with open source shit, and Facebook and Twitter sure as shit didn’t either.
Chrome as well, but the point stands that it is wild to say those companies started from open source like Bluesky has.
The closest true interpretation I can think of is that they, and most companies, fork open source software with permissive licenses since they can legally derive proprietary software from it. That’s why I’m a staunch (A)GPL boi myself.
yeah i was confused by that too. OOP could have left it as “user-centric” and i’d be 100% there.
I feel like a lot of people don’t seem to realize why the average person uses a platform like Bluesky. They’re not going down a checklist of features they want to see. Most people see the artists/celebrities/politicians they want to hear from on a given platform, and make an account on that platform so they can follow them.
And sure, nothing is stopping Bluesky from ending up like Twitter, at which point the users will find another platform to use. Such is the circle of Internet life.
you analysis is correct i just disagree in that i think plenty of people realize this :)
even before celebrities, the huge hurdle is “well my friends and family aren’t on there.” very few people who aren’t redditors want a social platform where you can’t be social with people you know.
That’s fair, now that I think about it platforms like this are 1000% in the minority of dogital social spaces
Yeah, my brother is only joining Bluesky simply to follow journalists.
And sure, nothing is stopping Bluesky from ending up like Twitter, at which point the users will find another platform to use. Such is the circle of Internet life.
That is with anything, mate. Even South Park made point about enshittification before the the term was coined lol.
Bluesky’s “open” BS line is proven BS by them not being federated already, even within their own non-activitypub protocol. This is also by design. Bluesky is what MSNBC was in the 2000’s, an oasis from the now way more rightwing thing they consumed before (CNN/Twitter) that dominated discourse in that era, when war is breaking out and more power is being centralized in the executive while ever more bounds are broken from the state-adjacent private sector. It has a purpose for the bourgeois that consume it, but it’s not like fediverse shit, which is REAL like pre-corporate internet, and has the potential to actually change everything.
