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Mastodon has a special culture as it got established as a response to and in the shadows of the social media dinosaurs. Reacting to big tech violations of priva
by college_physics 4y ago
Mastodon has a special culture as it got established as a response to and in the shadows of the social media dinosaurs. Reacting to big tech violations of privacy, manipulation by algorithmics etc, all these things are bundled together as an expression of evil together with an almost complete rejection and suspicion of any commercial motive whatsoever.
But as these decentralized and open source approaches (hopefully) flourish and the web gets rediscovered things will start differentiating and making a bit more sense. In particular communities that want to stay private will switch to other tech - there are more than enough options.
Things may get derailed again, in novel and unexpected ways once the fediverse gets mainstream, just like it happened with the web in the first instance.
Yet this is not a reason not to try - a bit wiser this time around.
- int_19h 4y agoNo culture will sustain a meaningful ban on anything that it cannot effectively enforce. The problem here is that the protocol fundamentally allows such indexing - and how could it be otherwise if you want content to be visible across a federated network? Therefore, people who have some utility to derive from it will do so, privately if necessary. Of course, if it can only be done privately, this makes its utility much less for some use cases - e.g. communal sharing of useful information - but doesn't affect other use cases - e.g. targeted advertising or harassment.
- Karrot_Kream 4y agoIndeed. I'm waiting for someone to index Mastodon instances and place their dumps on Freenet.