people (still) largely miss the dramatic ways in which "mastodon" is reshaping social networking - at least in principle * its not a single platform but a cons

people (still) largely miss the dramatic ways in which "mastodon" is reshaping social networking - at least in principle * its not a single platform but a constellation of federating servers based on different stacks and technologies. the specific mastodon implementation of activitypub is neither built-in nor required to participate in the fediverse. enabling different technologists/stacks to compete in a common arena will have an accelerating effect in how social networking evolves * its not closed source: people/communities having other ideas about "the best social network" are free to fork, implement and experiment with said ideas. this augments the previous point and will further enable exploring the space of possibilities * its not a single instance: within the confines of a specific design / implementation one can still tweak both hard configurations and soft rules to achieve specific community aims * maybe most importantly: it enables potentially alternative business models beyond the winner-takes-all surveillance capitalism model that has come to destroy social networking (and much else as well). think of public funds, non-profit, more commercial interest-based instances etc granted, its all still largely in the realm of potentialities and one could imagine all sorts of patches that will be required as weaknesses reveal through adoption and use, but many negative reactions at this point seem just intellectual laziness (or something worse). in a sense it is a benign coincidence that the most mature expression of the emerging fediverse has been mastodon (and the mastodon.social instance), which is a twitter lookalike. combined with the convulsions of the bird site this creates the perfect conditions for people to get exposed to alternate realities and breaking the TINA spell. This is particularly true for all sorts of institutions, luminaries etc active on twitter that have provided the platform with a legitimacy it does not really deserve