Comment by rglullis@communick.news on Emacs.ch (Mastodon Instance for the Emacs community) will shut down.

it’s fine if you want to have it as a hobby. It’s not fine if you want to destroy Big Tech.

Well, I guess it’s priorities. Destroying Big Tech would be pretty nice, but I’m really just here for the community.

Not to single you out, but this attitude is unbelievably frustrating. Everyone here loves to waste hours of their day signaling their virtue and complaining about all the evils done by the corporations, but so few are actually willing to put any skin in the game. they complain about entshittication from Spotify and Netflix, but religiously continue paying their subscriptions while refusing to support smaller, independent businesses.

Nice, I just hope that you are contributing with more than $1-2 per year. ;)

Also, if you understand the importance of support it the instances, why don’t you wish that everyone did the same?

But a paywall adds a considerable barrier to entry.

Indeed. We are already struggling to get users and content, adding a paywall would probably kill the platform

a paywall adds a considerable barrier to entry.

The idea is to get rid of “instances with open registrations”. It doesn’t mean that paywalled instances are the only way to achieve that.

We can have more people running their own small servers to share with their friends
We can have companies providing ActivityPub accounts to customers of their services (e.g, sign-up to the NYT and get access to any of the servers managed by Mastodon GmbH)
We can have companies operating their own AP servers for their employees
We can have phone/internet companies giving access to their AP servers as long as they have a contract or a positive balance on the top-up
We can have “pay it forward” instances: admins put up donations, but they explicitly declare how much they want per active user account. The instance only accepts new registrations when it has secured the resources.

I mean, you are not entitled to people being soldiers in your war against Big Tech. Like, I’d be totally for it, but some other time, nowadays I’m resting and being creative. Speaking of, not everyone here laps the crotch of Spotify et al. I’m a proud (but modest) pirate.

I wasn’t the one starting the protests against Reddit, and I am not the screaming at my computer whenever Elon Musk says something completely stupid.

I just thought that after all these years, more people have understood what “when you don’t pay for the product, you are the product” really meant.

The fediverse will never destroy big tech unfortunately. In their worst case, they will incorporate it and easily dominate.

If not completely destroy it, at least make it irrelevant for those who want to avoid it.

The FOSS movement never destroyed Microsoft, but it arguably made it possible for us to live in a world where Bill Gates owned every PC software that we run.

In my opinion, the fediverse as it exists today is very vulnerable to domination by big tech. The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is it is too small for them to care that much.

If the fediverse ever becomes mainstream, big tech will dominate it. If we want to fight big tech, we need to rethink our strategy and the fediverse, because right now, the fediverse is not ready to take it on.

How would that happen? If the core idea of “the Fediverse” is to have a loosely-connected network of servers and applications speaking a common protocol, how is it that they would use to “dominate” it?

I am not saying that Big Tech couldn’t try to use it “open wash” their solutions, like Facebook and Google did with XMPP before. But what I am saying is that (like XMPP) I think it’s virtually impossible for them to “dominate” something that is open.

I’m also not saying that the software we have is ready for the masses (it isn’t) but all the issues I see are just a matter of implementation, not a fundamental design flaw.

There’s several vulnerabilities:

the fediverse unfortunately remains quite centralized. Most users wanna join the big servers. If it wasn’t for the big servers literally driving people away, we would’ve been even more centralized
most people have no issue with corporate presence in the fediverse. They’re okay with blue sky and okay with threads. In fact, clearly Gargaron is okay with meta and threads.
big tech already has a federated server that dwarves the rest of the fediverse combined: threads. Yes it’s still not quite there yet, but if they complete its federation, they will dominate it.
gargaron showed he’s okay selling out to Meta. What prevents another instance admin? A corporation could easily offer enough money to a handful of instance admins and control all these instances.

This is not answering my question, or we have different ideas of what it means to dominate.

80% of email traffic is either Gmail or Outlook, yet none of Big Tech is able to control it fully. They can not force you to use their email server, and smaller providers still exist and are actually healthy business.

Is it hard to run an email by yourself? Yes. Is it impossible? Absolutely not. To me, that is what matters.

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