This is a really important point from Alan Jacobs:
Mastodon has certain virtues, at least for some, but let’s not attribute to it powers it does not have.
Federation is a step forward, but it does not solve everything. I think my post from 4 years ago holds up here.
@manton shouldn’t you disclose your conflict of interest in this context? You’re running a competing platform.
@aardvark017489 Hmm, it's not exactly a secret. Should Eugen Rochko disclose that he's the creator of Mastodon whenever he posts an opinion? 🙂
the next step imo is that everything becomes an Activity Pub post. the content owner controls it and doesn't have to post a link to it on someone else's server. what the decentralized web did was let everyone put up content, but the closed platforms concentrated and allocated attention better. the tradeoff was a loss of control. decentralized social protocols give us attention management but do it democratically.
And if you’re not running your own instance you’re not one whit less vulnerable than you were in Elon World
Maybe slightly less, since it is possible to migrate.
@wjmaggos I agree. We need a move back to open APIs and decentralized protocols. Blogs, ActivityPub, and whatever else fits.
@jasonekratz I was only trying to highlight his point about Twitter incentives not being solved by federation. There are UI issues too that we should be thinking about.
@jasonekratz One of the big ones is the "popularity contest" mentally of like counts and follower counts, which often lead to posting as a performance. That can sometimes bring out the worst in people. Also, Mastodon does have an algorithm now in Explore, even if it's curated. Much longer thoughts in the Community section of book.micro.blog.
@afif I post using Micro.blog, which can create inline links using Markdown/HTML. Mastodon will display them but can't create them itself.
