decentralization

Recent moves by Eugen Rochko (known as Gargron on fedi), the CEO of Mastodon-the-non-profit and lead developer of Mastodon-the-software, got some people worried about the outsized influence Mastodon (the software project and the non-profit) has on the rest of the Fediverse.

Good. We should be worried.

Mastodon-the-software is used by far by the most people on fedi. The biggest instance, mastodon.social, is home to over 200.000 active accounts as of this writing. This is roughly 1/10th of the whole Fediverse, on a single instance. Worse, Mastodon-the-software is often identified as the whole social network, obscuring the fact that Fediverse is a much broader system comprised of a much more diverse software.

And so it has come to this. I finally quit Twitter… almost exactly a decade ago.

I could spin yarn and claim it was some major feat of clairvoyance, of course. That I foresaw all that happened lately with Twitter and decided to bail early. But it wasn’t that, really. I just felt strongly that centralized services are dangerous and unethical, and I decided to stop using them. Back then, Twitter was the last one on the chopping block for me.

The “Why”

Why did I feel so strongly about centralized services? Had you asked me ten years ago, it would have been difficult for me to explain. But even then I would have said it boils down to control and power dynamics. At the time I was a Free Software advocate, working for a Polish version of the FSFE. Software freedom was (and remains) important to me and it seemed obvious that one cannot have software freedom in a walled garden.

Hardly a strong, concrete argument, I know!

A version of this post was originally published on Redecentralized and VSquare.

After the violent events at the US Capitol social media monopolists are finally waking up to the reality that centralisation is dangerous; with power over daily communication of hundreds of millions of users comes responsibility perhaps too big even for Big Tech.