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I think this will likely happen either way. My prediction is some Mastodon server will become much bigger than competitors(even now mastodon.social is far bigge

I think this will likely happen either way. My prediction is some Mastodon server will become much bigger than competitors(even now mastodon.social is far bigger than others) and they won't be able to pay cloud cost by just donation. Then they would introduce ads, and then it will be clear that other servers could serve users better without ads and they have the monopoly to cut ties with those who scrape content from them and could significantly increase revenue by owning the content.

dragontamer 3y ago
We need proper assurances. 1. Maybe the US government wakes up and finally starts to use antitrust law properly? A company is nominally for the betterment of our country, and not just the profits of a few. Previous administrations would split up companies that got too big, like "Ma Bell" as they used to call it. 2. Government could split up networks to prevent them from reaching effective monopoly power. It's clearly not in the users best interest to centralize as much as we have today. 3. Alternatively, EU could move in this direction since I don't think USA is super interested. ------ I don't wanna reach for the regulation button unless necessary. But it's a tough problem, and I don't see a solution outside of government on this particular case.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  How will splitting companies solve the issue? The problem is that for lot of big companies ads is the only driver of revenue and that leads to bad decision. Even if you split the ad divison, the revenue will come from the same thing.. making product worse for increasing ad clicks. Splitting makes sense if there are unrelated companies giving benefit to each other because they are part of same organization like Bell labs. And even in Bell labs splitting failed and they merged again.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    But a lot of smaller companies, the forum / discussion site is just there for support. Factorio, for instance, needs a discussion site where players could swap strategies and discuss the game. Its complex enough that the players have a need to work together to discover how... say... the best layout for trains was or other such systems. Factorio was funded by two sources: Reddit (/r/Factorio was very big), and the developers, who ran a private phpBB forum for this purpose. Additional hosting existed across the internet to help distribute mods, "Blueprints" and other community-sourced strategies/features. There's no need to make a giant mega-advertising webpage. The "usefulness" of these systems is far smaller.

dragontamer 3y ago

We need proper assurances. 1. Maybe the US government wakes up and finally starts to use antitrust law properly? A company is nominally for the betterment of our country, and not just the profits of a few. Previous administrations would split up companies that got too big, like "Ma Bell" as they used to call it. 2. Government could split up networks to prevent them from reaching effective monopoly power. It's clearly not in the users best interest to centralize as much as we have today. 3. Alternatively, EU could move in this direction since I don't think USA is super interested. ------ I don't wanna reach for the regulation button unless necessary. But it's a tough problem, and I don't see a solution outside of government on this particular case.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago
How will splitting companies solve the issue? The problem is that for lot of big companies ads is the only driver of revenue and that leads to bad decision. Even if you split the ad divison, the revenue will come from the same thing.. making product worse for increasing ad clicks. Splitting makes sense if there are unrelated companies giving benefit to each other because they are part of same organization like Bell labs. And even in Bell labs splitting failed and they merged again.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  But a lot of smaller companies, the forum / discussion site is just there for support. Factorio, for instance, needs a discussion site where players could swap strategies and discuss the game. Its complex enough that the players have a need to work together to discover how... say... the best layout for trains was or other such systems. Factorio was funded by two sources: Reddit (/r/Factorio was very big), and the developers, who ran a private phpBB forum for this purpose. Additional hosting existed across the internet to help distribute mods, "Blueprints" and other community-sourced strategies/features. There's no need to make a giant mega-advertising webpage. The "usefulness" of these systems is far smaller.