The statement follows a lively back-and-forth conversation earlier this week between Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko and Bluesky board member and journalist Mike Masnick. In the conversation, published on their respective social networks, Rochko claimed, “there is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi.” (The Fediverse is the decentralized social network that includes Mastodon and other services, and is powered by the ActivityPub protocol.)
“And this is why real decentralization matters,” said Rochko.
There’s a fundamental fact that people fail (or refuse) to grasp about decentralized services like Mastodon (and Lemmy) - they don’t actually exist in any standard sense.
“Mastodon” is really just a handy collective name for the ad hoc community of innumerable individual sites that each independently run the Mastodon software.
And yes, as Rochko notes, there is nobody who can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi (or for the fediverse to do or not do any other thing). It’s necessarily up to the individual instance owners to do as they see fit. And that’s very much the point.
It astonishes me how many people can’t seem to wrap their heads around that simple but crucial fact.
They’ll need to be careful. Both BlueSky and X may launch covert, bot-powered attacks to try to take down or cripple the largest Mastodon instances. I am also concerned about GitHub (many projects are run by very few devs who aren’t invincible and can get scammed into accidentally including malware in an official update), and Lemmy, similarly, and now Android’s closing ecosystem.
The Web is becoming so nuts lately… Capitalism is truly cancerous and ruthless. I don’t know what solution there is to this madness… maybe just Linux-everything and a return to local intranets instead of the Internet, but that has its own numerous challenges…
My main gripe is that these massive tech companies are built on the backs of FOSS while their contribution to open source is minuscule compared to profits. They ruthlessly monetize everything as you put it: the employees, the code, your data, your time, and for what? How does this actually make our lives better in a meaningful way?
The fediverse is the next step in taking the web back so that it can start working for humans again. I hope it can stand up to big tech and the lawmakers in their pockets. We can be sure they will fight like hell when money is on the line.
I hope it can stand up to big tech and the lawmakers in their pockets.
I’m feeling less hopeful, but I hope I’m wrong…
Why would one non-commercial social media platform (Bsky) attack another non-commercial social media platform? I don’t see any upside.
Bluesky is VC backed. Just because they aren’t turning a profit yet doesn’t mean that’s not the end-game for them.
non-commercial
Where did you read that Bluesky is nonprofit? The upside is the chance to drive traffic to themselves, as always; cancer only ever cares about growing itself, no?
