Clearly troll bait, but I just wanna say that no one is repeating twitter. This is decentralized. Even if corporations move in and create their own instances it will still remain decentralized. Even if it splinters into pockets of federation, it will still be more of a public domain than twitter ever was, being owned by one corporation.

With all the dangers of disinformation and "echo chambers", but a bit bigger. And what for? So more people can feel they have followers and spend time cultivating that?

You have to take the good with the bad. People seem to like being social online.

I never understood it myself, was never active on anything but IRC. But ActivityPub seems truly magic when it comes to promoting communication across boundaries such as corporations and software stacks, so I jumped on it back in 2017 and loved seeing it blow up in 2022.

There are clearly a lot of very nice, and very normal, people on there who just love the concept of microblogging. Who am I, or you, to stand in their way? And why should they depend on one corporation to communicate when they can take it into their own hands?

It's really a very natural progression, just like we have many ISPs, phone companies, or anything else in society.

> There are clearly a lot of very nice, and very normal, people on there who just love the concept of microblogging. Who am I, or you, to stand in their way? And why should they depend on one corporation to communicate when they can take it into their own hands?

Because many are not nice and the platforms clearly have been abused, drive division in society and are bad for mental health. That's why we can't have nice things.

I can't disagree, it's all about the dopamine hit to most people. I've felt myself slipping down that slope.

But at the same time I just learned of a protest here in my town, via social media. So it's also helping people organize IRL.

Yes, let's all stay in the existing disinformation echo chambers.

If you see disinformation and find yourself in an echo chamber on a platform where you can chose who you see and engage with, I am afraid it's not the platform's fault.

If you get cancer from smoking, it's not the tobacco's industry's fault. If you get shot in a classroom, it's not the gun seller's fault.

...yes? that's the point.

The libertarian's point of view?

People need to see this play out again in order to rule out the possibility that the problems Twitter had and caused were just due to that particular platform, in that particular scenario. If Mastodon (or any of the other alternatives) go down the same road, they'll begin to wonder if the cause may be something deeper. But, they won't arrive at that conclusion by abstraction, or else they would have already.

Another possibility is it'll work out great.

I admire your positive attitude, but facebook nor snapchat nor tiktok have shown any other trend. "Social" media are social in name only.

> else they would have already.

Except it doesn't work that way. People are some mixture of dumb, greedy and vain.

> Another possibility is it'll work out great.

What would be the positive outcome? Preferably one that wasn't heralded 20 years ago and has not borne out.

I'm a pessimist too, however you may be discounting the effect of capitalism in your analysis. To me it seems reasonable that efforts of a group of cooperatives instead of a group of for-profit companies could lead to a different result.

Of course there are and will also be highly negative effects, but the hope is they will be more easily isolated as a result of many cooperatives taking action to exclude those negative effects and their propagaters, rather than rely on policies and practices of a small number of profit-seeking companies.

It’s not capitalism, it’s society. The problem wasn’t twitter, the tech or the company, but the way it was used and consumed. The same actors with the same audience will have the same effect on Mastodon. Only this time there won’t be someone to moderate.