Telorand

Yeah, still a net positive. Not complaining, just informing.

I've just seen the "it's federated ~~(eventually)~~" and "it's a public benefit corporation" tossed around on occasion like they're exonerating evidence, and I would hate to see people get tricked into a false sense of security.

...as a public benefit corporation.

I would encourage everyone to read about what a Benefit Corporation is. It's still for-profit, but being public benefit gives the officers a little protection from shareholders suing them when stock performance goes down. In theory, this protects them from being driven solely by profit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

However, there's no real guidance or oversight on whether a company still qualifies for that designation. They can self-audit, they can vote to change to a normal corporation at any time, switch back again, etc. This is not a different tax classification, this is a corporate board promise, and I have no reason to think they'll stay a public benefit corporation, even if they have the best intentions right now.

That's why some people just create their own instances.

True! I forgot about that. Other accounts have used similar functionality.

That's cool. Well, I wish them well. Hopefully they can make something that's good for people and not just chase profits.

Mastodon devs didn't care to cease the moment

And they never will. That's not their focus or goal. They don't care about "gaining momentum" and explosive growth, and I wouldn't want them to.

That's up to us. Convincing people to join the Fediverse and showing them better alternatives to their favorite platforms (and teaching them how to use them) is our collective job, not some group of hobbyist devs.

Plus I think explosive growth would change the vibe of the Fediverse in a negative way, since most people expect it to be free (i.e. "I am the product") and shitty (so always taking offense). I'm fine peeling people away over time.

For groups, I don't know if Mastodon will ever get that or not. Friendica exists, it's more analogous to Facebook than Mastodon, and it already has groups and public/private forums. I'm not really sure if that would be a great addition to the microblog format of Mastodon, anyway, so I don't really care if it never comes.

musk could just buy it. jack already sold twitter to him,

Yeah, certainly, or some other billionaire. I think it goes without saying that most of us here understand the flaws with centralized services.

I'm not saying it's the best choice ever, but I'm hopeful that the choice to leave Xitter might do positive things to people's mentality when BlueSky almost certainly repeats history. It's not likely to happen right away, as even an offer to buy would take time to approve, so for now, I'm taking it as a net positive.

The Fediverse will continue to grow and change in the meantime, and we'll all still be here to help them migrate to better things in the future.

People aren't going to be convinced of social/communism overnight.

I celebrate the move to BlueSky as positive in that they are no longer propping up an apartheid tech bro who's now running a meme branch of US Government, and also because many of them are doing the thing they were scared to do before: leave. They now know how that feels and what it will be like rebuilding friend groups and such.

It's not the anti-corpo step many are deluding themselves to believe it is, but getting out of the muck and learning how to take the step to change something are both things I see as positives that can be guided to better things in the future.

I see that, now that you explain it that way. That does seem ethically questionable.

I'll have to take some time to learn more about the details, so I can make my own informed decision.

1. That's lazy journalism. There's a functional search bar as well as trending hashtags.

2. There will never be suggestions by design, but there's accounts like FediFollow and guides on how to get started with Mastodon. If you meet those people in the future, tell them to follow hashtags for topics they like, and encourage them to start using hashtags. They'll find people that way.

3. This is also by design: there's no suggestions, because there's no algorithm. You decide what goes on in your feed (boosting is another important part of that). If you've looked at everything, explore a new hashtag, follow more people, check the Local or Global feeds, or Satan forbid anyone actually take that as a sign to take a break and go touch grass.

I have Bazzite on a laptop for the ease of use and general resistance to breakage, and Spiral Linux in a VM. The latter works flawlessly that way, like it was always meant to be in a VM.