Discussion
The following thought isn’t original - I’ve read echos or this on here and happy to edit to credit the source. IMHO the most serious threat to the open social web is corporate capture.
I’ve seen examples up close of C-suite types driven by greed and power, who are exhibiting grossly unethical behavior. Can’t disclose specifics because people on the sidelines shared info on background. Not sure what to do, I’m just really worried, that’s all. We are at a pivotal point and can’t mess this up #EEE
@_elena
You can't have commons without protection, or else the corporations will seize on it.
@_elena
You can't have commons without protection, or else the corporations will seize on it.
@_elena
Every digital autonomous zone will be, sooner or later, attacked by corporations and/or established powers. Because today digital freedom is against their interests and mentality.
Here we’ve usually seen an embrace / assimilate / extinguish strategy, based on the “fedi must welcome more people” and “normies want things easier” principles. It didn’t work but it will be used again.
Honestly, I see all this as another war against any form of digital independence from attention / subscription / surveillance economy. And I don’t trust any chief developer, foundation, digital guru or whatever. Humans are weak and will fail.
Fedi being fedi, instances can block and defederate. Protocols can be forked. People can selfhost. This is our strength. But digital autonomous zones are temporary by themselves, one day we’ll have to create other spaces for people like us. Be prepared.
@_elena I heard this one once and think it might apply. I hope you will be able to: "Subvert the dominant paradigm!"
@_elena I worry too. Vectors would seem to be capture of:
1. Mastodon co and associated protocol spec
2. Server forks adding desirable features and then pivoting to enshittification
3. Capture and corruption of large instances. A large instance is very vulnerable because running one costs significant effort to manage and fund.
Kind of leaves me torn between wanting Mastodon to grow and wanting it to stay undesirable enough to fly under the radar.
For clarity (see previous toot) I'm not worried about the existing state of the fediverse re: corporate capture. To me this space is the Rebel Alliance.
What worries me is the wrong project (a corporate entity sovereign-washing) attracting NEW people to the open social web saying: pick this protocol (not AP) and our server to enjoy a new, ethical era of social media (they're far from ethical).
What I know about their shenanigans would blow your minds (not allowed to disclose it, maybe one day)
@_elena What needs to happen is for those mind-blowing shenanigans to be made illegal, so that you'd be more incentivized to disclose them, maybe even obligated by law.
@_elena So, isn't the best response to this threats to find a way attracting new people by offering some additional "services" to them?
When talking with people about their problems with the fediverse and the reasons why the don't switch away from BigTech, they have 2 or 3 points: 1. Finding the right service and the appropriate instance and 2. Fear of loosing their contacts aka "bubble" / pears. And sometimes they have no idea how to find the subjects they are interested in, and the people talking about that subject.
I know, there are solutions for all of this problems, but when they handled problem 1 and start looking around it is not helpful when the answer to your question 3 is "No problemo, just use hashtags".
When searching the hashtag to your subject, while the rest of your bubble is still on BigTech, your search will deliver: nothing. No profiles, no toots, no hashtag. And for that, no argument to bring your bubble here. I know, that sounds like a chicken or the egg dilemma. And it is...
What could be a possible solution? Which additional service is necessary to solve this?
@_elena co-optation might be more harmful then capture: it allows for expansion where previously there was a threat of loosing an audience, and makes it more difficult to maintain alternatives because alternatives need public attention and discourse, and competing for those with corporations, on corporations' terms, that's fighting a losing battle.
@khobochka @_elena Indeed. There are many examples of co-optation. If "growth" is a dirty word, then let's call it green growth, and stick some green label on everything. The point is that we should have our own labelling.
@_elena This seems similar to what happened to the word "organic" in food and agriculture since its coinage decades ago: it was co-opted by the industry and, in time, technically started to mean something very different (e.g. organic certifications in different countries are quite casual in what they allow), and it also stopped being a threat to the industry which now occupies both the market niche and the discourse, leeching subsidies away from alternatives and drowning out other discourse.
@_elena This all sounds so secretly that I can imagine the worst thriller plots ever (too much imagination). I imagine a bad mafia conquering your instance and the rest of the Fediverse would defederate and the mafia could only join truthsocial. 😈
I fear more people could found new networks, copying us here, propagating them as decentralised and EU alternative and all would follow ... 😎
@_elena So far we, the Fediverse, have survived a few tries at corporate capture. We are lucky that mastodon, the company, so far has refused to go the VC (Venture Capital) road. Facebook/Meta more or less failed with their not-so-serious Threads attempt, the immune system of the Fediverse isolated the hyper-capitalistic and far right instances to stay in their own bubble. In my opinion the glass is more full than empty 😊 And I still refuse to accept bridges to BlueSky on my instance.
@_elena if they had contacted you anonymously what would you do about it?
That might be true.
Still my understanding is that the scale and the growth of the Fediverse is not big enough yet, that those types of people will choose the Fediverse as a target.
My worries are rather the growth of the Fediverse in all its different flavors.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
