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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t matter how distributed the servers are. You could say any centralised platform is “distributed” if it has at least one redundant server, which plenty of them do. Youtube has servers all over the world. That has nothing to do with enshittification and it’s not the feature I was talking about.

    The thing that supposedly set bluesky apart was that they would be using a decentralised protocol that allowed anyone who wanted to to operate their own server with full control over their data. You can actually see some people posting from different domains.

    That’s a nice idea and it trades on the rising popularity of the fediverse, but it’s not doing it in an open manner because the software isn’t open and separate instances are locked to 10 users maximum unless the central authority allows them more. That means it’s not meaningfully decentralised, but it’s still trying to capitalise on the concept. It can still be torpedoed by one company’s bad business decisions.

    That’s what I was referring to.

    And I said mastodon might be able to take in the exodus if they improve, so I guess I agree with your last point.


  • By “technically better” I mean it actually delivers on its technical promises of decentralisation, as opposed to bluesky that simply uses decentralisation as a buzzword without being actually open source and without allowing real competition for the main - centralised - instance.

    I think mastodon has actual legs in that if bluesky fails to actually open up, it will enshittify and there will be another exodus. Mastodon has technical barriers to that kind problem, so it will still be there to pick up the pieces. The decentralised nature protects the network from enshittifying and means it will tend not to get exoduses like central platforms do. It’s a matter of making that growth count.

    If in that time mastodon has worked on its discovery features, it might be finally ready to capture that growth.

    If bluesky manages to properly decentralise then I imagine mastodon will not need to pick up the slack and will either join the network or fade into irrelevancy.

    Hard to say which way it will go. I don’t hold out a lot of hope for bluesky changing its ways, and who knows when mastodon will improve in this way.



  • I think the rise of hate speech on centralised platforms relies very heavily on their centralised moderation and curation via algorithms.

    They have all known for a long time that their algorithms promote hate speech, but they know that curbing that behaviour negatively affects their revenue, so they don’t do it. They chase the fast buck, and they appease advertisers who have a naturally conservative bent, and that means rage bait and conventional values.

    That’s quite apart from when platform owners explicitly support that hate speech and actively suppress left leaning voices.

    I think what we have on decentralised systems where we curate/moderate for ourselves works well because most of that open hate speech is siloed, which I think is the best thing you can do with it.