It has an owner who can do with it whatever he wants. When you participate in that, you give value to another’s property. Matodon, lemmy and the rest of the fediverse are collective, they do not have a single owner, giving value to the platform only gives value to its users.
I don’t know about the rest, but for me that is an insurmountable problem.
Maybe, but the thing about Mastodon, is that it works even without “Mastodon”. There are a slew of other platforms that work seamlessly with Mastodon. So if Rochko decides to do something you don’t like, you can move to Misskey or Pleroma or any number of other Mastodon-adjacent platforms while losing zero functionality.
What makes this work is ActivityPub as the backbone, as the protocol is open to anybody. ATProto, which Bluesky uses, is basically only used for Bluesky and nothing else. And Bluesky controls both their platform, and the protocol, whereas Mastodon controls only their own platform; the ActivityPub protocol is not owned or controlled by Mastodon in any way.
It has an owner who can do with it whatever he wants. When you participate in that, you give value to another’s property. Matodon, lemmy and the rest of the fediverse are collective, they do not have a single owner, giving value to the platform only gives value to its users.
I don’t know about the rest, but for me that is an insurmountable problem.
Isn’t Eugen Rochko the owner of Mastodon? Isn’t he and his company responsible for what happens to it?
Maybe, but the thing about Mastodon, is that it works even without “Mastodon”. There are a slew of other platforms that work seamlessly with Mastodon. So if Rochko decides to do something you don’t like, you can move to Misskey or Pleroma or any number of other Mastodon-adjacent platforms while losing zero functionality.
What makes this work is ActivityPub as the backbone, as the protocol is open to anybody. ATProto, which Bluesky uses, is basically only used for Bluesky and nothing else. And Bluesky controls both their platform, and the protocol, whereas Mastodon controls only their own platform; the ActivityPub protocol is not owned or controlled by Mastodon in any way.