|
I think it has been time to leave the massive American (and now the Chinese one too) "tech" companies for a while. So in a sense, it's great that Elon has shown the world the existence of Mastodon and the ActivityPub beneath it. I know, I know, a lot of you already knew about it and were already on it too, but I sure didn't. I'm European, Danish to be exact, and I've had this weird feeling about our politicians and public institutions being on things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on, for about a decade now. Not because it's wrong for them to use the social media platforms, but because they rely so much on American advertisement companies in doing so. In that sense, something like Mastodon just makes a lot more sense. Our government could operate a Mastodon server where they house all our elected officials, and nobody would be at a risk of being banned for breaking some American TOS. They would even be able to moderate their comment threads a lot better, by not allowing stuff like American anti-vaxxers to comment on things about Danish vaccine programs without first having to rely on Twitter or Facebook to police it for them. It seems the EU has already gone in that direction, or at least did so back in the spring of 2022 when Elon first announced his plans to buy Twitter, but our local politicians haven't yet followed. Similarly, our journalist profession has something called a "pressekort" which is basically a certificate that shows the world that you're a Danish journalist. They could come together and build a Mastodon server where a "pressekort" is required to be a member. (There are already some of those springing up, so I guess it's already happening), and it's already limiting the amount of misinformation that happens on their posts by a massive amount. I know this won't be the "free to say anything without consequences" haven a lot of people here on HN want. We're already seeing right-wing network servers and users completely blocked, but it's sort of how free speech works in a democracy. Before the American advertisement companies gave the village looney a platform, nobody around here listened to them. We still largely don't listen to them in my country, but we sure waste more time on them than we did in the world before Facebook. So yes, the time has come to leave centralised Social Media companies. The real question is, whether we will actually do it. I'm not going to say that joining Mastodon was hard, because it wasn't. But I spent about a week researching a good server to join, and that's sure "harder" than just pushing my telefonnumber into TikTok. |