Notices by Mikko Alasaarela :equel: (alasaarela@equel.social)

@aral This is not entirely accurate. Wildebeest is open source and the developer said in GitHub that they are working on supporting account migrations as soon as possible. So there will be no lock-in. It's good to have many parties developing new open source implementations of Mastodon and ActivityPub. The current Ruby implementation is by no means perfect.

@atomicpoet Agree with this analysis fully. The lack of moderation makes many corners of the current Mastodon downright dangerous. We should not trust that an average person running a server can handle complex moderation problems. Broad-based anonymity enables malicious actors to grow massive dormant troll farms, waiting for the day to start manipulating.

We shouldn't be stupid or naive about this, but rather build tech and methods to tackle these problems, and make them widely available to everyone.

Finland has closely watched the Russian troll factory's efforts to create chaos in free democracies. We now educate our children to recognize #misinformation and rank #1 in our ability to resist it.

I wish the Americans would do the same.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/world/europe/finland-misinformation-classes.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqIhkSVUaAybKWsIjolqLmOLI2LF7iH74KCGTRXNHzv8UBYaH4ULEeatkYZ442z2AX9Jadr8zQfg4hsluA3tQcSj66J2VhMZCZCwvtYO4Wm5x1smXBO5nqDKvYjbndKIileKy-huKO2n1UPDY1nZ3JV1np5pkZkjqjSJTvtrNFuF-3dV83f4zVNstFXpbOn7877S_AA5-Od6Hchjf9gE0PupbUj3RltSXgKkSJEQQURmVCSMivhtvrY9UK9gVP6zgLhY_e8eYgrwZDmVgLofBFIS5pvO9ZV-vudr4BKbnXCby

I see a lot of discussion about the fear that corporations and VCs will take over the #fediverse.

The thing is, #Mastodon going mainstream will require a lot of capital and development of new products and innovations for this ecosystem.

And that is perfectly ok, as long as everyone connects to the protocol, and the protocol itself stays away from the hands of oligarchs.

If you prefer your local coop to host your account instead of Mozilla, Vivaldi or some other larger entity, that's great. But it's also totally fine that those bigger players are offering theirs, because it pulls in a lot of new members to this ecosystem.

The main corporate takeover attack vector to the Mastodon ecosystem will not be the servers, but the mobile app. It is possible that one VC-backed mobile app becomes the single winner with most Mastodon users accessing the ecosystem with that. The owner of such an app will wield a lot of power over all servers and service providers in the ecosystem.

Algorithmic feeds and fuzzy search are both inevitable mainstream features as the ecosystem grows. People need those to be able to use the platform effectively.

This is fine too, as long as there's no single algorithm dominating, and especially if the algorithms are built transparently with users being able to choose their own algorithm.

There are going to be many points of contention as the ecosystem grows, but for the sake of humanity, let's allow decentralization of social media to happen. Let's also allow VC-backed startups to flourish building services for all of us.

We have the momentum now, and it is a rare chance to take back the power from corporate overlords, and rebuild the social internet as an open platform for innovation!

Would you agree?