I miss the old Twitter when I saw the stupid X animation.
~~Twitter~~ X is Elon Musk’s world. Pretty soon he’ll have so much control over his platform that he can practically cron kings and manipulate outcomes to fit his personal political agenda. And don’t even get me started on his whole stupid “X the everything app bullshit.
The only everything app that has succeeded so far is WeChat in China. But it’s apparently a surveillance app for the masses by the government. Seriously, why the hell would I want to link my social media account with my bank account and even my government ID? What’s the benefit in that?
I’d rather keep the digital me disconnected to the real me.
What's wrong with Mastodon? It's already established.
By "established" what I really mean is it's already gone through the difficult part (i.e. while it's not dominant I think it's passed most of the hurdles that most attempted platforms have failed at). If something's going to do better than Mastodon, it's going to have to have something that people want that Mastodon doesn't have, which I'm not seeing here, but maybe I'm wrong.
I'm personally using a modded version of the official mastodon app called Moshitodon with my firefish account, not perfect and missing firefish-only features but it works
Sure, but since anyone can own a mastodon instance this isn't unjust.
Then where are your audience?
?
Closed source? Cringe.
Does it even have a web version? It doesn't seem to be available for my Linux distro of choice, jumping through hoops to install some proprietary app would make it a massive fail.
You can self host it, not that I would but if you need more privacy.
Cryptographers probably would know that and would have spoken up. Because it's open source. But sure, shill for closed source and talk shit about the reverse.
Elon got the idea from China’s WeChat. Elon loves him some despots.
It's not just the data, it's also about getting a cut of any monetary interactions, essentially the Visa/MasterCard model. The company holding the "everything" app for a given region has an incredible potential to earn money.
Wanting to be the master of data when Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta exist is cute :)
Wether it's centralised isn't really the main issue with these platforms. It's their For-profit nature. Running a social platform in a for profit manner, is incredibly hard to do - only one company has been known to succeed, YouTube.. and they stopped reporting their earnings in 2015, so no one can tell if it's still profitable or not.
If you are a not for profit company trying to create a social platform, you've got more of a chance of it working. However if you're not for profit doing this, you need to release the soource code. That way if you decide to restructure into a for profit entity we can fork it and save said platform.
Decentralization is the result of the requirements of financing large userbase not for profit platforms in a sustainable way - it actively spreads the cost load across multiple not for profit servers. Allowing donations to be the income driver of the platform right from the beginning. Being not for profit requires that you only ever aim to cover the costs of running the servers - it doesn't require you to offer any additional services in order to increase revenue, or systems in order to lock people in.
The fact that the data is spread across this server network, inherently making data breaches worth somewhat less than a megalithic platform is literally just an unintended side benefit, despite the fact it's a little bit mitigated as a result of caching requirements.
The thing is, a for-profit platform can look at this financing model and try to twist it to their moneymaking advantage - just look at bluesky. It gets nonprofits to host services, while keeping a tight grip on the algorithms, by providing a library of them to "choose" - the source code is closed, as a result it's nearly impossible to tell if these servers are reporting analytics and data back to the central service (covered by the centralised algorithm provider and sign up system) for data collection and data sales.
A decentralized platform like that, allows the company to offload hosting costs by taking advantage of independent nonprofits, while also getting to make a huge profit by selling a fucktonne of data mined from these servers.
Also it removes the need for advertising providers be on the platform, which is a benifit not only because people don't like ads, but also because advertising companies are fickle and very hard to meet their brand safety demands and retain them. Advertising revenue is rarely stable or reliable.