mastodon.online is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A newer server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Server stats:

12K
active users

Returning to the (FOF) initiative discussion (for background see links below)...

@pluralistic has a new piece (pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap) that extends his "fire exit" analogy and discusses how it is not corporate ownership, VCs or profit motive alone that causes enshitification. It also requires captive users, and FOF will make it so Bluesky users are not captive. It all sounds good, but it's not realistic because the assumptions behind it are based on vaporware marketing.

more...

pluralistic.netPluralistic: Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital (20 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

@pluralistic

Somewhere in the 1980s software companies discovered that they could announce products with fabulous features long before they were developed as a means of getting potential customers to delay purchase decisions for their competitors actual real products. The term 'vaporware' came to refer to these schemes. Over the years vaporware has evolved to be used for all sorts of clever market manipulations and you could say that most of Silicon Valley now runs on vaporware.

more...

@pluralistic

Sometimes vaporware products actually get made with a small subset of the promised features, but more often they just continue to get delayed serving their market manipulative purpose. One thing about vaporware products is that there is no shortage of complex and detailed descriptions of what they WILL DO.

more...

@pluralistic

Enter Bluesky and the AT protocol. We are told it is a simple matter to make Bluesky distributed. All we need to do is make another 'relay'. Seems easy, right. But Bluesky hasn't done this yet because [insert reason here]. Enter FOF, who figures, well Bluesky won't build a second relay with their technology, we will do it!

Do you see the problem here? Maybe, building complex undeveloped, unproven, untested relays is a huge engineering challenge. Maybe it's impossible.

more...

@mastodonmigration @pluralistic Why would you expect Bluesky to create a second relay? They already have one.

The entire point about relays is that to keep the ATverse federated, independent relays should exist. It has to be a third party that creates the next relay.

@mastodonmigration @pluralistic As to why there isn't a second relay - well, it's a design flaw that there's no incentive to create one, and that's a legit criticism of AT. But a non-profit creating one to support the network is definitely one way to get a second relay.

@mastodonmigration @pluralistic (The main reason it's not been done "for funsies" is because relays are rather resource intensive. You'd be looking at a fairly major bandwidth and storage bill if you set one up. My view is the entire concept needs to be revisited because of that but... *shrug* Regardless though, a suitably big institution should have no problem hosting one.)