Even the lack of behavioral advertising doesn’t explain why Mastodon grew in the 2016-2017 period. Another inheritance from GNU social is the FOSS model of community development. Mastodon has been fueled by contributions from hundreds of other people....
In our conversation he argued that, since his childhood, computation has shifted away from our control over personal devices and towards distant, monopolistic centers – including corporate social media. Instead of having control over our own computers, Balkan says we have ceded that control to centralized systems whose definition of success is endless growth....
The answer is yes, but artists are also hedging their bets....
There are other, even more formalized approaches than the Patreon approach used by Cloud Island. Some fediverse instances joined the Open Collective Foundation, a charitable non-profit organization that operated in multiple countries, providing administrative and fundraising resources for its members....
Could these blocklists devolve into personal grudgelists? Both Ro and Oliphant are very aware of this issue, and both are establishing governance structures to mitigate this risk. In Ro’s case, he has partnered with nonprofits, such as the Nivenly Foundation, to help build a governance structure....
Critical reverse engineering includes a normative component: the goal is to make something better than the original. What is “better” can vary quite a bit. In my research, I’ve studied alternatives that center protections for free speech, seeking to avoid censorship....
Pasek is also thinking about aesthetics and ways to manage media....