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Cl1mh4224rd t1_j1ni49z wrote

Reply to comment by Article_Used in Tech Journalism Doesn’t Know What to Do With Mastodon by psychothumbs

>it’s twitter, except can’t be bought out and run by a billionaire.

This is a bit naive, though, isn't it?

What's to stop a corporation or billionaire from setting up a Mastodon server and accumulating users? Or multiple servers? What's to stop corporations buying up the most popular Mastodon servers and then merging them?

I mean, if a schmuck like me can do it, a billionaire can do it at a much larger scale.

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Article_Used t1_j1niccm wrote

nothing, but then what’s to stop the users from leaving for another, uncorrupted server? that’s the difference.

they’re also interoperable with other federated servers, so anyone can leave without losing their followers or who they follow. i can’t migrate off twitter until the people i want to follow do as well.

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B-Rock001 t1_j1nywec wrote

  1. That's asking for users to take an action... majority of user base would ask why should I care it doesn't affect my service? I wish more people cared about it, but reality is people just want something that works.

  2. Hosting isn't free, who pays for it? What happens when the billionaire provides the most stable instance because they can afford it? Crowd funding can get you so far, but it's hard to keep going.

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Article_Used t1_j1nz6si wrote

i don’t care if anyone else transitions, the key is that i’m able to, and easily. hosting is <$10/mo, so worst case i pay for my own instance, best case i split it with a thousand of my closest friends.

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B-Rock001 t1_j1nzsea wrote

Cool, so mastadon solves the problem for you and people who are like you (more tech savvy)... but what about all the people who don't have the know how or don't want to do that? Will you let them freeload on your server driving up your costs? Or will they go to the billionaire's free server?

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Article_Used t1_j1o1h4m wrote

you can see for yourself now, there are plenty of free mastodon servers being run currently, without the generosity of any billionaires.

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B-Rock001 t1_j1og6m9 wrote

For now, we'll see if that scales. Not sure how many people can cover operating costs at the scale of Twitter, even decentralized. I notice you didn't offer to foot the bill...

Besides, seems the corporate profits argument just shifts to hosting services at that point.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for there to be better, ethical social media, it just doesn't seem like mastadon is the revolution supporters want it to be.

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