I think the silver lining to the cloud of Elon Musk buying twitter and taking it private has made people realize the shortcomings of not just twitter, but the whole social media ecosphere. Your access is controlled by a corporation, and once you've posted something, your words belong to a corporation.
We depend on these corporations to be good stewards, and in most cases, they have been, but realizing that an unhinged billionaire could just up and buy something so large and run it as he pleases has many people questioning that dependence.
Anyway, that's my post for today, Tomorrow back to regularly scheduled postings
@pbx The problem with centralized control for internet-scale technologies in 2022 is that it's too expensive to run without a whole bunch of money coming in from somewhere. The only way to introduce a new service today without a whole bunch of money to back it up is to design a federated protocol for it.
@pbx I think also, that federation is really just an implementation detail that nobody really has to care about. Email is also federated, but nobody really cares about that, just the fact that you can send an email to anyone with an address. The difference is that when most people first got internet access, the ISP would run an email server so that everyone just automatically got an email address.
@mattrose I think it's also a cautionary tale about centralized control. Nobody's going to buy Mastodon, because it's not a monolithic thing.
But I don't think that aspect gets much attention, because it's so unfamiliar.