I don’t know about anyone else, but I moved to the fediverse to get away from big tech. They might join us, but I for one won’t be joining them.
I know it’s also kryptonite to a lot of normal decent users too, but I think some parts of the fediverse drop as many n-bombs and swastikas as they do as an inoculation against corporate takeover. No corpos seeing dollar signs over there, that’s for sure!
Exactly why I‘m here too and I‘m gonna go to some instance which defederates from the corpos, I‘ve become so wary of them I don‘t even want to wait until they enshittify whatever they set out to do.
I’m old enough to remember when Facebook Messenger was compatible with XMPP (as was Google Hangouts, then called Talk). You could talk to people on there from your own server, you could use whatever open source client you wanted. It was great.
Then they cut off the federation. Then they cut off the API.
They’ll do the same again. Once enough of your friends and family are on their network they cut of federation and you have to move to them if you don’t want to get cut off with it.
We all must do our part. When their new activitypub based social media platform codenamed p92, goes live… All instances should defederate.
Mastodon CEO? Isn’t Mastodon federated? I thought the benefit of being federated was having no CEO?
Now, if you are like me, you hear the words “open source” and “decentralized” and then the word “CEO” and think, wait, why does the decentralized open standard have a CEO? The whole point is that no single person or company is in charge, right? Well, welcome to the wild world of open-source governance. It’s a riot, my friends. You’re going to hear me and Eugen say the phrase “benevolent dictator for life” in dead seriousness because that’s how a lot of these projects are run.
Read more for the context at the link.
This is a quality article. Thank you for your contribution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network) But it is free software. So even if he goes corporate we should hopefully be able to recover.
Eugen Rochko is CEO of Mastodon gGmbH which is the company which develops the Mastodon software. It isn’t the software itself; that’s open source and could be forked and developed by anyone. Nor is it any of the instances which can be operated by anyone who wants to and they don’t even have to use Mastodon’s code to do so.
I could set up a company to run an instance and call myself CEO if I wanted, it would only mean something to users on my instance, I guess.
The overlapping names are, probably unintentionally, slightly confusing.
