For over three years now, since Elon Musk decided to spend $44 billion turning Twitter into his personal playground, we’ve been watching the open social web slowly, sometimes painfully, come into its own. Bluesky. Mastodon. The broader ATmosphere and fediverse along with a few other experiments (nostr! farcaster!). These aren’t just tech experiments anymore—they’re real alternatives that millions of people use every day.
And yet.
While these open social systems are working, and working well, tons of people are still choosing to stay in closed, proprietary, billionaire-controlled systems, where they have no control, no say in how they work, and no real agency. We’ve heard various excuses. We’ve heard about the pull of inertia. We’ve even heard the complaints that people haven’t found communities they like… or that they actively dislike some of the communities that have formed.
So instead of just writing another post about why that matters (I’ve written plenty), Johannes Ernst from FediForum and I are doing something about it. On March 2nd, we’re hosting an online “un-workshop” focused on one question: how do we actually grow the open social web even more?
And, yes, I’m on the board of Bluesky, but this isn’t Bluesky specific. We want an open discussion and brainstorming on growing the wider open social web.
This isn’t your standard conference where you sit through presentations and nod politely. It’s a participatory event built around the FediForum unconference model, though modified to be more of an ongoing brainstorming workshop (not unlike the Greenhouse events we’ve run here in the past).
Before the event, participants can submit short position papers—your experiences, your ideas, your proposals for what might actually work to engage more people on open social systems. We’ll cluster those into topics and spend the actual event discussing them and brainstorming around them, not just listening to people talk at you.
Here’s the thing: we want people who have real ideas and experience. People who have tried (and maybe failed) to get their friends onto the open social web and learned something useful from it. People who have had success convincing entire communities. People running organizations who are trying to figure out how to make the jump. Builders who want more users. Advocates who have done actual research with actual humans about what’s working and what isn’t.
What we don’t need are more cynical hot takes about why the open social web will never work. If you’ve already decided it’s a lost cause, this isn’t the event for you. Go post about it on Threads or whatever. We also don’t need hot takes about how you’re glad most people don’t use the open social web. That’s great for you open social hipsters, but some of us think it’s important to get more people to recognize the power of open social.
So, for everyone else—the people who believe this matters and want to figure out how to make it happen—we want to hear from you.
The event will run from 8am to noon Pacific (which means Europeans can actually attend without setting an alarm for 3am), and registration is open now. The event will be run online, using Remo, a tool we’ve used in the past for online events, that is conducive to small group discussions and brainstorming.
Position paper submissions are due by February 16th, and while they’re not required, they’re strongly encouraged (you can submit them during the registration process). The whole point is to come prepared to engage, not just spectate.
Look, I’ve been writing about the importance of protocols over platforms for years now. The open social web represents one of the few genuine shots we have at building online spaces that aren’t controlled by a handful of companies (or their billionaire owners) making decisions based on whatever serves their interests that week. But potential doesn’t matter if we can’t translate it into much wider adoption.
So if you’ve got ideas—real ideas, not just complaints—about how to get there, come share them.
Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.
I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.
Similar questions have come up a few times in the last few months, and I thought that it made sense to write about my thoughts on the wider decentralized social media ecosystem, just as we’ve hit the two year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Since then, he’s wiped out billions of dollars in value and revenue, turned what had been a pretty neutral open speech platform that fought globally for free speech, into a one-sided, bot-filled partisan platform that only fights for free speech when it disagrees with the government, but is happy to cave if the authoritarians in charge are friendly with Musk.
But the one key thing is that the decentralized social media landscape has been invigorated and supercharged, almost entirely because of Elon Musk. Thank you, Elon.
I previously told the story of my attendance at a conference in New York in October of 2022, where there was a very interesting presentation predicting the adoption of decentralized alternatives to centralized social media with this chart being shown:
As I noted, this chart and the “events that trigger disillusion” in particular struck me as a bit too underpants gnomey:
What those “events that trigger disillusion” actually are becomes pretty damn important. So, I had asked a question to that effect at the event. For years since my Protocols, Not Platforms paper came out, I had struggled with what would actually lead to real change. I didn’t find the presenter’s answer all that satisfying, but little did I know that literally while that presentation was happening, Elon Musk was officially saying that he would drop his attempt to get out of buying Twitter, and would move forward with the acquisition.
At that point, Bluesky was still just a concept of a protocol. It was far from any sort of app (it wasn’t even clear it was going to be an app). But in the events that followed over the next few weeks and months, as Elon’s approach to dismantling basically everything that he claimed he supported with ExTwitter became clear, Bluesky realized it needed to build its own app.
Indeed, it’s astounding how much Elon has become the one man “events that trigger disillusion” from that chart above. With it, he has become a singular driving force towards driving adoption in alternative platforms.
Thank you, Elon, for continuing to supply “events that trigger disillusion.”
But waiting for Elon to fuck up again and again is not a long-term strategy, even if it keeps happening. It is introducing more and more people to the alternatives, and many people are liking what they’ve found. For example, well-known engineer Kelsey Hightower recently left ExTwitter and explained how ATProtocol (which underlies Bluesky and enables much of what’s great about it from a technical standpoint) is one of the most exciting things he’s seen in years.
The more I dig into Bluesky, and more importantly the AT Protocol, the more I get that feeling I had when I first got involved with the Kubernetes project.
But, the reality is that no one quite knows what is going to really “click” to make decentralized social media more appealing long term and for more people than centralized social media. Many of us have theories, but the reality is that what makes something really click and go from a niche (or dying!) thing to essential is only possible to understand in retrospect, rather than prospectively.
Just as I spent a few years trying to work out what kinds of things might be “events that trigger disillusion,” I think we’re still in the discovery stage of “events that trigger lasting value.” People leaving the old place because they’re disillusioned is a starting point. It’s an opportunity to show them there are alternatives. But to make it last, we need to create things that people find real value out of that weren’t available at the old place.
The key to every “killer app” on a new system, even ones that start out mimicking the old paradigm, is enabling something that couldn’t be done on the old system. That’s when things get really fun. Early TV was just radio with video until people figured out to embrace the medium. Smartphones were initially just tiny computers, until services that embraced native features like location were better understood.
As such, we need more experiments and experimenting, and not all of that should be done directly within the ATProtocol system (the ATmosphere). Because, even while I think it’s extremely clever in what it enables, the choices made in its approach might limit somethings enabled by other approaches. So I don’t so much see other decentralized social media systems like ActivityPub (Mastodon, Threads, etc.), nostr, Farcaster, Lens, DSNP, etc., as competitors.
Rather, I see them as all presenting unique experiments to see where the real value can show up. I think there’s a ton to learn from all of them. For example, I think Mastodon’s focus on local community and the power of defederation is a fascinating experiment. We’re also seeing some interesting new systems built on ActivityPub that challenge the way we think about decentralized apps. I think that nostr’s simplicity that makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to build clients and relays is important. Farcaster has a number of really cool ideas, including things like Frames that allow you to create apps within social feeds.
In other words, there is a lot of experimentation going on right now, and all of that helps the wider ecosystem of decentralized social media, because we can all learn from each other. We already see that Mastodon has been making changes in response to the things that people like about Bluesky. I’m sure that everyone working on all of these systems are looking at what others are doing and learning from each other.
The simple reality is that right now, no one really knows what will “click.” We don’t know what the real “killer app” is that convinces more people to switch over from centralized systems to decentralized ones. “Events that trigger disillusion” are great for getting people to look. But, getting people to stay and eagerly participate requires adding real value.
I’m happy to see all this experimentation going on to figure out what that is. Just “being decentralized” is not a value that attracts most users. It has to be what that decentralization enables, preferably the kinds of things that a centralized system can’t actually match, that will create the next breakthrough.
Since no one can predict exactly what that breakthrough is, the best way to find out what will really make it work is having the wider decentralized ecosystem all experimenting. This isn’t even a “rising tide lifts all boats” kinda thing. It’s more of a “we need lots of folks digging holes to see where the oil is” kinda thing. Letting each of these systems test things out with their own unique approach is the best way to discover what will actually excite and attract users positively, rather than just in response to yet another Elon Musk Event.
I’m enthusiastic about Bluesky’s approach. I think the ATProtocol gives us the best chance of reaching that breakthrough. But I’m happy to see others trying different ideas as well, because all of these experiments will help bring us to a world where more people embrace decentralized systems (whether they know it or not) and move away from old walled gardens. Not because of “events that trigger disillusion” but because what’s happening over here is just that much more useful and powerful.
In the light of the continuing mayhem on Twitter under Elon Musk, lovingly chronicled by Mike in ever-longer posts, it’s no surprise that many people are looking at alternatives. One of the main options is Mastodon. Although offering similar micro-blogging functionality to Twitter, one of its chief attractions is that it nonetheless does certain things differently.
For example, there are no formal quote tweets, which means that users are encouraged to engage with what people are saying in their posts by replying to them, not simply to make a snarky hit-and-run comment. Its federated structure, with thousands of interconnected and interoperable “instances” – that is, servers – is part of the larger “fediverse“. There is no central point of control, and the local rules and culture on different instances vary widely.
These features, combined with the issues at Twitter, have led to a noticeable growth of Mastodon – even if the exact number of users is unclear – and of the number of instances that are available. One open question is whether Mastodon will ever be used by businesses in the same way that they now routinely use Twitter.
An early pioneer in this area is Raspberry Pi, which makes a popular series of very low-cost, single-board computers. Typically they are used to run the open source operating system GNU/Linux, so Mastodon seems a good fit for the company, since it too is open source. Even better, the federated nature of Mastodon means that Raspberry Pi was able to set up its own instance – raspberry.social – and run it on one of its own products. Everything seemed to be going well, until the Raspberry Pi account on Mastodon posted the following:
We hired a policeman & it’s going really great. Meet our #Maker in Residence @TobyRobertsPi.
“I was a #Surveillance Officer for 15 years, so I built stuff to hide covert video & audio gear. I’d disguise it as something else, like a piece of street furniture or a household item.
During all those years of working with Raspberry Pi, I never thought I’d end up working here; as I’ve always been a #RaspberryPi fan, I’m fascinated to see what takes place behind the scenes.”
A post by Aurynn Shaw, who runs cloudisland.nz, an instance hosted in Aotearoa New Zealand, provides a great summary of the discussion that ensued. Here’s a sample of how the Raspberry Pi account responded in a rather Twitter-like way to people’s criticisms of the new appointment:
“Yes Sebastian. And if you can’t chill, you can unfollow. That’s how social media works. Just chill.”: link
“Feel free to block or unfollow us” in response to “if only they’d not hire cops”: link
“people can follow or unfollow us if they like” link
Shaw writes:
As the common theme from Raspberry Pi was to tell other users to unfollow them, and blocking any criticism, the Fediverse as a whole was very quick to react.
Due to the very different power dynamics of the Fediverse, it took less than two hours from the initial post and initial harmful replies before the official Raspberry Pi instance started being defederated, noted via the #fediblock hashtag. This public hashtag is a way for administrators to co-ordinate with each other in an attempt to reduce harm to their users, and hitting #fediblock is a strong indicator that an instance is being cut off from the the Fediverse until they improve their moderation abilities.
“Defederation” is another unique and important feature of Mastodon. It means that various servers running Mastodon block interaction with a particular instance that is deemed to be problematic. It is quite an extreme remedy. Normally, there is some kind of moderator on an instance that would deal with the renegade user who is causing problems elsewhere. In the present case, the problem user and the moderator are effectively the same, so defederation was the only way for other instances to deal with the situation. Shaw notes that reversing defederation and the damage to Raspberry Pi’s brand that it has caused, will be quite hard:
Now that Raspberry Pi has hit the #fediblock, recovery becomes considerable more difficult. Not only does Raspberry Pi need to withdraw their statements and issue unequivocal apologies, they must also apologise directly to the admins who defederated them, and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to change.
This commitment can be demonstrated through administrative and moderator changes, or demonstrated over a significant period of time. Both approaches will take time for trust to be regained.
As Shaw points out, the problem arises because this is a small, self-hosted instance run by a company. She offers some recommendations for other businesses that want to do the same, including this:
Brands seeking to join the Fediverse will need to invest not just in a social media manager, but competent and long-time administration for the instance that is aware of the political dynamics of the Fediverse, in order to ensure that they are able to stay on the fediverse.
As more businesses dip their toe in the waters of Mastodon, the problems Raspberry Pi has run into here can serve as a good example of how not to do it.
Plenty of people have raised concerns that Donald Trump’s sketchy new social media site, Truth Social, is just a lightly reskinned Mastodon, which is violating Mastodon’s fairly strict AGPLv3 license. As we had previously discussed, the aggressive (and sloppy) terms of service for the site claim that the code is proprietary, and even claims that “all source code, databases, functionality, software, website designs, audio, video, text, photographs, and graphics on the Site (collectively, the ?Content?) and the trademarks, service marks, and logos contained therein (the ?Marks?) are owned or controlled by us or licensed to us…”
Of course, part of the reason that Mastodon uses such a license is to encourage others to take the code and build on it if they abide by the terms of the license. And the nature of Mastodon’s license is that if you use it, you must make the complete source code available of what you build with it. The key bit of the license:
You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to
produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the
terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified
it, and giving a relevant date.
b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is
released under this License and any conditions added under section
7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to
“keep intact all notices”.
c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this
License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This
License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7
additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts,
regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no
permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not
invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.
d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display
Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive
interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your
work need not make them do so.
It’s not clear that any of these conditions have been met. So, now the Software Freedom Conservancy has given Trump 30 days to bring the code into compliance — specifically by providing the source code to Truth Social to the early users who were able to sign up — or, under the license terms, Trump’s “rights in the software are permanently terminated.”
Early evidence strongly supports that Trump’s Group publicly launched a
so-called ?test site? of their ?Truth Social?
product, based on the AGPLv3’d Mastodon
software platform. Many users were able to create accounts and use it
? briefly. However, when you put any site on the Internet licensed
under AGPLv3, the AGPLv3
requires that you provide (to every user) an opportunity to
receive the entire Corresponding Source for the website based on that code.
These early users did not receive that source code, and Trump’s Group
is currently ignoring their very public requests for it. To comply with this important FOSS license,
Trump’s Group needs to immediately make that Corresponding Source available to all who used the site today while it was live.
If they fail to do this within 30 days, their rights and permissions in the software are automatically and permanently
terminated. That’s how AGPLv3’s cure provision works ? no exceptions ?
even if you’re a real estate mogul, reality television star, or even a
former POTUS.
I and my colleagues at Software Freedom Conservancy are experts at
investigating non-compliance with copyleft license and enforcing those
licenses once we confirm the violations. We will be following this issue
very closely and insisting that Trump’s Group give the Corresponding Source
to all who use the site.
I think that’s called being put on notice. It will be interesting to see how Trump responds — and what happens next.
Summary: Formed as a more decentralized alternative to Twitter that allowed users to more directly moderate the content they wanted to see, Mastodon has experienced slow, but steady, growth since its inception in 2016.
Unlike other social media networks, Mastodon is built on open-source software and each “instance” (server node) of the network is operated by users. These separate “instances” can be connected with others via Mastodon’s interlinked “fediverse.” Or they can remain independent, creating a completely siloed version of Mastodon that has no connection with the service’s larger “fediverse.”
This puts a lot of power in the hands of the individuals who operate each instance: they can set their own rules, moderate content directly, and prevent anything the “instance” and its users find undesirable from appearing on their servers. But the larger “fediverse” — with its combined user base — poses moderation problems that can’t be handled as easily as those presenting themselves on independent “instances.” The connected “fediverse” allows instances to interact with each other, allowing unwanted content to appear on servers that are trying to steer clear of it.
That’s where Gab — another Twitter alternative — enters the picture. Gab has purposely courted users banned from other social media services. Consequently, the platform has developed a reputation for being a haven for hate speech, racists, and bigots of all varieties. This toxic collection of content/users led to both Apple and Google banning Gab’s app from their app stores.
Faced with this app ban, Gab began looking for options. It decided to create its own Mastodon instance. With its server now technically available to everyone in the Mastodon “fediverse,” those not explicitly blocking Gab’s “instance” could find Gab content available to its users — and also allow for Gab?s users to direct content to their own users. It also allowed Gab to utilize the many different existing Mastodon apps to sidestep the app bans handed down by Google and Apple.
Decisions to be made by Mastodon:
Should Gab (and its users) be banned from setting up “instances,” given that they likely violate the Mastodon Server Covenant?
Is it possible to moderate content across a large number of independent nodes?
Is this even an issue for Mastodon itself to deal with, given that the individuals running different servers can decide for themselves whether or not to allow federation with the Gab instance?
Given the open source and federated nature of Mastodon, would there reasonably be any way to stop Gab from using Mastodon?
Questions and policy implications to consider:
Will moderation efforts targeting the “fediverse” undercut the independence granted to “instance” owners?
Do attempts to attract more users create moderation friction when the newly-arriving users create content Mastodon was created to avoid?
If Mastodon continues to scale, will it always face challenges as certain instances are created to appeal to audiences that the rest of the ?fediverse? is trying to avoid?
Can a federated system, in which unique instances choose not to federate with another instance, such as Gab, work as a form of ?moderation-by-exclusion??
Resolution: Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, refused to create a blanket ban on Gab, leaving it up to individual “instances” to decide whether or not to interact with the interlopers. As he explained to The Verge, a blanket ban would be almost impossible, given the decentralized nature of the service.
On the other hand, most “fediverse” members would be unlikely to have to deal with Gab or its users, considering the content contained in Gab’s “instance” routinely violates the Mastodon “covenant.” Violating these rules prevents instances from being listed by Mastodon itself, lowering the chances of other “instance” owners inadvertently adding toxic content and users to their server nodes. And Rochko himself encouraged users to preemptively block Gab’s “instance,” resulting in ever fewer users being affected by Gab’s attempted invasion of the Mastodon fediverse.
But running a decentralized system creates an entirely new set of moderation issues, which has turned Mastodon itself into a moderation target. Roughly a year after the Gab “invasion,” Google threatened to pull Mastodon-based apps from its store for promoting hate speech, after users tried to get around the Play Store ban by creating apps that pointed to Mastodon ?instances? filled with hateful content. Google ultimately decided to leave Mastodon-based apps up, but appears ready to pull the trigger on a ban in future.
While so many of the discussions and debates about content moderation focus on a few giant platforms — namely Facebook, YouTube and Twitter — it’s fascinating to see how they play out in other arenas. Indeed, one of the reasons why we’re so concerned about efforts to “regulate” content moderation practices on social media is that focusing on the manner in which those big, centralized platforms work could serve to stifle newer, more innovative platforms, whose very set up may inherently deal with the “problems” in the first place (see my protocols, not platforms discussion for one example).
There are a few interesting platforms out there trying to take a different approach to nearly everything — and one of the more well known is Mastodon, an open source “federated” system that is sort of somewhat like Twitter. If you somehow have missed the Mastodon boat, I’d recommend the long piece Sarah Jeong wrote about it two years ago, which is a pretty good intro to the topic. The really short version, though, is that anyone can set up their own Mastodon community and, if others so choose, they may “federate” with other Mastodon communities. You could build a Mastodon instance that is totally isolated from others, or you could build one that connects to others and allows “toots” to go from one instance of Mastodon to others. And, of course, the federating can change over time. It’s kind of neat in that it allows for multiple communities, who can set different rules, norms and standards, and thus you get much more widespread experimentation. And, unlike a fully centralized system, like Twitter, the ability for different instances to just “go there own way” if they disagree, allows for much greater flexibility, without a centralized content moderation impossibility.
I’m still more interested in much more fully decentralized protocol-based systems, but a federated system like Mastodon, that allows for a distributed set of mini-centralized instances that can join together or separate as needed, is still pretty fascinating.
However, it got more fascinating and interesting earlier this month when the social network Gab moved to Mastodon. If you haven’t followed this space at all, Gab likes to call itself the “free speech alternative” to Twitter, but in practice that has meant that it’s the place that many trolls, racists and other general assholes have gathered after being kicked off of Twitter. Gab announced, back in May, that it was planning to shift its platform to Mastodon, setting up its own instance. In theory, this solved some “problems” that Gab had been facing — starting with the fact that Apple and Google had removed Gab’s mobile app from their app stores (something Gab sued over, in a strategy that was not very successful). Since there are a bunch of Mastodon apps that allow users to log into any particular Mastodon instance, Gab itself made it clear that this was a key reason for the move:
Of course, building on top of someone else’s better tested open source code probably also helps Gab with the long list of technical issues the site was having. And then there’s the pure troll factor. Besides harboring social media trolls, Gab, as a company has always sort of gleefully taken on a trollish roll in the way it works as a company as well. And, considering that part of the very reason that Mastodon’s creator, Eugen “Gargron” Rochko, set up Mastodon in the first place was to build an alternative to Twitter that was free of Nazis, assholes and trolls… it was a truly trollish move to jump onto that platform and at least imply to many a plan to “invade” (or, perhaps we should say brigading) the wider “fediverse” of Mastodon.
The switch over happened earlier this month and it’s been fascinating to watch how it’s all played out. The shortest summary might be that the federated model has shown to be somewhat resilient so far. Mastodon itself put out a statement urging various Mastodon instances not to federate with Gab and also suggesting that the various Mastdodon app developers choose to blacklist Gab’s domains from their apps (meaning that Gab’s plan to use this to get back into the app store might not work as well as planned).
The Verge has a long, in-depth article about how all of this is playing out, and it seems like, as a federated system is designed to do, different parts of the system are experimenting and figuring out what makes sense. Most of the other instances have decided they don’t want to federate with Gab.
If you join a major Mastodon instance right now, chances are you won?t be connected to Gab. ?All the admins that I know, that I interact with myself, have already blocked Gab,? says Rochko ? including Mastodon.Social. ?Essentially, they?re isolated.?
As for the various app makers, they’re figuring out what they want to do:
This has turned app access into a battlefield. Developers can lock Gab out by disabling login options to the instance or completely blocking content from its servers. And several have done just that. Mastodon lists six major mobile apps on its homepage. Four of them ? the Android client Tusky and the iOS apps Toot!, Mast, and Amaroq ? block Gab in some fashion.
Amaroq developer John Gabelmann banned Gab to avoid potential problems with the App Store. ?My core objective is to keep Amaroq publicly available and to abide by all Apple policies, which keep unmoderated extremist/hateful content off the store,? he tells The Verge. ?If your network is large enough and unmoderated enough to get the negative attention of Apple, Amaroq will follow Apple?s policies.?
Mast?s creator Shihab Mehboob, by contrast, blocked Gab after users requested it. He?s gotten one-star reviews from angry Gab users, but ?if hate speech is masquerading as free speech on an app I?ve built, it?s upon myself to somehow moderate that and reduce it where possible,? he says. ?I understand that the Fediverse is intended to be open and entirely at the user?s discretion as to what they want to see/use/partake in, but that shouldn?t cover Nazi-based ideologies. There has to be a line drawn somewhere.?
Other app developers maintain that this blocking doesn?t fit Mastodon?s mission. The Android-based Fedilab app?s free version initially blocked Gab because of Play Store content policy fears. But the ban has since been lifted. ?I will simply not block instances with the app,? wroteFedilab?s developer. ?I clearly think that?s not my role ? If you want a strong block, it?s in the hands of social network developers or your admins.?
And the developer of Subway Tooter, who goes by Tateisu, is skeptical that stores will censure apps for supporting Gab. ?They can run their web app on a web browser,? Tateisu points out. ?If Google wants to ban it, they should start from their Chrome web browser.?
This is all quite interesting. It’s also the kind of experimentation and more distributed decision-making we’d like to see more of online. This is not a truly distributed system where the power is moved all the way out to the ends, but it is a federated system where the power is moved to various nodes — leading to more competition and variety. The fact that most of the major Mastodon instances have said they don’t want to federate or deal with Gab is an expression of preferences, and in many ways a better overall system than one in which a single company is making the decisions. And it’s much better than politicians telling companies what they need to do. Of course, in a world without Section 230 — or one with a nonsensical requirement for “neutrality” in platform moderation — would these options even be available?