Hey folks, if you’re still on birdsite, please help me boost this tweet:
https://twitter.com/aral/status/1084413170360422401
Let’s get some more folks on Mastodon and the fediverse while also raising awareness about surveillance capitalism.
Thanks in advance :)
@aral Do you think that this here will scale surveillance capital free? If we replay the open web here, someone will set up a bit obvious hub (cf mastodon.social's popularity) and then start tracking people, and most normal peeps won't want to move.
I feel the mistake we made with the early web was we made it open, but we left it closable. I don't see how the fediverse (for all I love it) has solved that problem. Once advertising driven money sees fediverse, what's to stop it just co-opting it?
@mdales It hasn’t solved the problem and it’s a point I often make myself. We only solve that problem with a network where there are no privileged nodes and thus no return on scale.
That said, we need bridges (both technical ones and ideological ones between surveillance capitalism and a post-capitalist peerocracy) and the fediverse is just such a bridge.
@mdales Regarding your first point, we must remain vigilant and use social shaming and social exclusion (public shaming and domain blocks) to stop VC-funded initiatives (startups) in the fediverse from gaining network effects to begin with.
There is nothing technical or legal to stop a well-funded VC-backed firm from embracing, extending, and enclosing the fediverse. The only power we have is not to federate with such nodes from Day 1. It’s our only weapon.
CC @Gargron
