Notices by Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@mastodon.social)

There's going to be a massive land grab of all these big instances. There will be lots of merging and acquiring too.

My advice is that you all become *very* aware of who owns your instance and why.

Get to know your admins—make sure their values align with your own.

If you don't want to put your social media life in the hands of strangers, then self-host your own instance.

To everyone using mastodon.cloud and mstdn.jp: remember, you're not locked into those instances.

If you want, you can migrate elsewhere.

This is not Twitter—you have a choice regarding where your home will be on the Fediverse.

A warning: there's going to be a concerted effort to re-centralize the Fediverse.

As we've just seen with the acquisition of pawoo.net, that's already happening.

What are you going to do to thwart this trend?

Everyone needs to be aware that Mask Group trades a crypto token.

This same entity now owns pawoo.net, mstdn.jo, and mastodon.cloud.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/12/21/encrypted-messaging-protocol-mask-network-acquires-mastodon-server-pawoonet/

Elon Musk is trying to walk back the banning of @.joinmastodon and likewise links to Mastodon instances.

He called it a "mistake".

In his words, "Yeah f***ing post Mastodon all goddamn day long, I don’t care."

I think he cares 🤣

What Elon Musk *actually* regrets is that the Mastodon ban helped grow the Fediverse.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-taking-down-071215977.html

Yet another question: "Why don't you migrate your mastodon.social account to another instance?"

Good god, do you want me to murder their servers?

I get so much stuff coming to this account that it will stress any small instance.

LOL! I know this because one day mastodon.social went down, and I started posting from another instance.

Lo and behold, I murdered that instance -- so lesson learned.

Now do I like the fact that, on the Fediverse, identity is tied to an instance?

No, I really don't like that about the Fediverse.

Again, if I had my way, identity would be wholly distinct from instances.

More specifically, all identities would be private, and all identities would manage public personas.

But this is a topic I'll revisit some other day.

Now for the next question: "Why do you have so many different accounts on so many different instances?"

Because nomadic identity hasn't gone mainstream on the Fediverse yet, so with every new service I want to use, I have to create a new account.

Annoying? Yes.

But that's just how it is right now.

The account that's hosted on mastodon.social (@atomicpoet) gets a lot of attention because I talk a lot about social media, economics, and tech.

But I also have other accounts that touch on other topics.

For example, @atomicpoet@peerverse.space talks about music and photography -- these are topics that are also important to me, and I want to talk about them. Folks who follow me on mastodon.social don't care so much about that stuff -- and that's fine.

The Fediverse allows for more space.

The biggest advantage of using mastodon.social is that I get access to features before everyone else.

For example, I could edit toots before this was available to other instances.

Sometimes I don't like a feature. So I tell @Gargron or I start a discussion on Mastodon's Github repo.

I also donate to Mastodon because this is the venture that provides perceived validation to the rest of the Fediverse.

"Why are you on mastodon.social?"

I get this question a lot. The simple answer: I've had this account for 4.5 years. Back then, mastodon.social was not so big.

I use this instance because it's maintained by @Gargron and we talk often enough.

Sometimes we disagree, but I like have access to "vanilla" Mastodon.

But I'm also elsewhere. I'm on *many* instances. Some are hosted by others, some are hosted by myself.

I don't even consider this my "primary" account -- just the most visible.

Seeing how mastodon.cloud and mstdn.jp are both owned by the same company that just acquired pawoo.net:

Are they on their way to becoming de-federated en masse?

After all, I imagine these three instances will federate with each other -- and pawoo.net is already a vector for lolicon and other disturbing content.

What's your opinion?

#fediblock

@rysiek @darnell @axbom @cwebber Friendica connects with GNU Social, so in a way, they're already here.

Like it or not, it should no longer be assumed that "volunteers" are running your instances.

The Mask Group, which now runs three large instances "has raised over US$50 million from private and institutional backers"—their words not mine.

BIG NEWS: Pawoo.net, the world's 2nd biggest Mastodon instance, has just been acquired.

The entity acquiring them is the Mask Group, a business that also runs mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud. They are also active in the so-called "Web 3.0" space.

If you haven't heard of pawoo.net, it's because many instances have de-federated from it.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mask-network-acquires-pawoo-net-070000858.html

@darnell @rysiek @axbom Can Parliament-Funkadelic join this mythos?

I know they're not Star Trek canon, but I want them to be.

Someone asked me, "What's the trick to gaining followers on the Fediverse?"

I'm a terrible person to ask because I don't actually know -- I'm afraid that I have no tricks!

Personally, I just talk about things I care about regardless of who's listening. If someone actually is listening, we have a dialogue.

If you want to have a genuine conversation on the Fediverse, don't chase metrics.

Instead, express what you care about.

Lovely article by @zoesqwilliams about her journey from Twitter to Mastodon. It really is.

But I feel it needs a corrective.

It's not called the Fediverse because Mastodon is comprised of many servers.

It's called the Fediverse because there's literally a universe of federated protocols, apps, instances, and tools that talk to each other.

Mastodon is just one of those apps. There's also Pixelfed, Peertube, Misskey, etc. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/16/could-this-be-twitter-without-the-toxic-slurry-my-week-on-mastodon

@zoesqwilliams What the Fediverse actually is needs to be shared and publicized more often.

So let me tell you the broader implications. The Fediverse is no less than the biggest technological great leap forward for social media in a generation.

Protocols like ActivityPub allow different apps and instances to talk to each other.

Because of this wildly different apps can be built—and they can all use the same network effect without having to build one from scratch.

A few Twitter migrants have told me, "I don't care about all this Fediverse technology, I just want to remake Twitter."

You can't remake Twitter. It's impossible. An understanding of the technology will demonstrate why it's impossible.