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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.

finance.yahoo.com/news/mask-ne

consent.yahoo.comYahooist Teil der Yahoo Markenfamilie

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.

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.

Chris Trottier

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?

@atomicpoet As much as I agree w/ you, such an effort will fail. We can all vote w/ our feet by walking away to other instances. And if such 're-centralized' instances get blocked, they lose the momentum of network effect fairly fast.

@gisiger Yes, that's one failsafe mechanism for the Fediverse. However, people need to care enough about de-centralization.

@atomicpoet @gisiger if you want people to care, you have to make it easy for them to discover.

My favorite idea is forming consortia of Mastodon admins with similar values to actively de-federate bad instances.

@atomicpoet @gisiger I'd say that for most, ease of communication is higher priority than decentralization. If the Fediverse continues to scale up, I fully expect that some dominant, but not exclusive, commercial sites that provide an attractive user experience will emerge, just as happened with email. Other instances can respond to that in various ways, but I don't expect that defederating them on principle would work any better than refusing to exchange email with AOL or gmail would have.

@JMarkOckerbloom @atomicpoet @gisiger
I chose aus.social purely for the ethics of it. I reckon rather a few ppl are keen to only support that which is independent & community-centred

@ZiptieZoe @atomicpoet @gisiger I agree many will, just as a number of people choose indie email services, often for ethical or privacy reasons. Though those email services generally keep exchanging email with the big providers, who serve the majority of email users and are cheaper & easier to use for many than most indie email services.

Any instance can of course refuse to federate with any other. But it'll be a very different experience on narrowly federating instances than on broad ones.

@atomicpoet @gisiger there will be some sort of attempt at “embrace and extend”…

@gisiger @atomicpoet oh yes - especially predators at the edge of the OSS firelight

@atomicpoet @gisiger also what Chris is doing is promoting situational awareness—which is key.

@gisiger @atomicpoet Maybe? But I bet the majority of people don't care about centralization at all and can't be bothered to move. And if there are enough people on centralized instances, blocking them won't matter, it will isolate us more than them.

@gisiger @atomicpoet Regardless, though, the vast majority of my friends and connections on Mastodon are on small servers and I will happily stay here with them.

@tessa @atomicpoet Well, there's one point I always make about social media: most people (i.e. the casual users) aren't actively looking for reach or fame or whatever. They're happy if they find their people, their community. They don't care about decentralizatrion or centralization. They simply go where their tribe is. But those people aren't the people who voice their concerns--they simply don't care. I don't blame them.

@gisiger @atomicpoet Defederating from large/consolidated instances solely because of their size/trajectory sounds self-marginalizing.

@atomicpoet Does it matter? If the underlying protocols are architected for federation and easy migration then any instances that go bad won't last long.
I do see a model like SMTP e-mail becoming a thing where technically anyone can federate, but it becomes increasingly hard for non well-resourced players to provide the necessary abuse management to play effectively.

@rob The instances that have gone bad have lasted for a very long time.

Technology does not replace human moderation.

@atomicpoet If the actions of the operators cause users any problems then they are two button presses away from migrating to another instance. The Musk problem couldn't arise here, provided acquirers don't do deeply evil things like defeating the migration mechanism. Someone *will* try it and the community response will define how the ecosystem eventually goes.

@rob With all do respect, the Musk problem can not only happen on Mastodon, it has happened.

You might want to look into a few more instances.

@rob @atomicpoet They could easily disable the migration/export data button in their instance and literally lock people in?

@yeri @rob @atomicpoet

I was about to say that. A very popular Mastodon instance that progressives jumped to over the past couple years did just that. They are defederated, also.

@paul @yeri @atomicpoet So they are no-longer part of the federated network. That is going to make them deeply unattractive to (most) new users. That is a choice they made, and something their existing users will have to deal with. Jumping ship to move back to the federated network is slightly more complicated for them, but isn't something the people who are part of the federated network can fix.

@rob @yeri @atomicpoet

It has over 30k users and growing for a few years. It's an echo chamber, too. Default Mastodon features, like a public facing user profile page, is a premium upgrade.

@rob @atomicpoet you're assuming that users are all aware of and invested in decentralization. Many Twitter migrators might even actively prefer a centralized model and be complicit. If that, or even just sheer ignorance from people seeking "the next thing," hits a critical mass, then no one will need to defeat the migration mechanism. It'll become irrelevant.

@rob @atomicpoet That's a very naive stance. If you think bad things can't happen here, you probably wont be careful or vigilat and then they WILL happen.

Those "two button presses" can just be disabled. The instance can do stuff to attract many users and then just change the protocol step by step.

It's not the first time that would happen. And ignoring that threat won't just make it go away.

@Glatorius @atomicpoet I don't believe it is naive at all. The proof point of a functional ecosystem is that it will develop a diverse range of funding options for operators from: "gift to the community", through "Mastodon blue", through to Fb style "we sell all your data". Maybe some innovative stuff involving micropayments to post/read as well, and the web 3.0 folks have something useful to contribute here.

It is practically a certainty in my mind that some instance somewhere will disable aliasing to prevent migrations away when they perceive that is in their narrow short term commercial interests.

There are also, as others have said embrace/extend/extinguish vulnerabilities inherent in any any open protocol.

How other instance operators respond to these things will define how things go long term.

@atomicpoet

Everything in my power to end capitalism because capitalism ruins everything

@atomicpoet I don't think they will be able to re-centralize me, because I am a self-hosted holdout and remaining independent from BigTech BS was always my goal.

The main thing to watch out for is not some big instance but what happens to the protocol. The re-centralizers will try to manoevre such that they control the protocol, both through standards organizations and as a defacto implementation. So be very resistant to any protocol changes which create dependence on a single server or a single company. They will always claim that the company is benevolent and the people initially in charge will always be friendly individuals with good intentions who then later get replaced.

@atomicpoet If they could buy those instances, that's also because they were for sale.

Migration is gonna be difficult for Japanese users. Who's going to run a new Japanese instance that could welcome ~1.2 million users? (if there's really 1.2m active users, Pawoo kind of cheated on this)

Also they all run on an obsolete version of Mastodon (namely 3.3 or 3.4) so no automatic migration.
Pawoo is even a fork that was heavily patched at a time were a lot of features weren't available. They were #1 in creating new features when they were owned by Pixiv.

@atomicpoet And btw, a lot of Japanese people that are aware of Pawoo or even use it don't even know it's a Mastodon server.

@fenarinarsa
Stuff often surprisingly becomes for sale when you are offered enough cash.
@atomicpoet

@kaukamieli @atomicpoet espescially if you're offered cash for something that is becoming increasingly hard to maintain

@atomicpoet So, last time I checked my server had approx. 40 Accounts. And I am more and more content with that fact. When I chose it, it was a random pick, because it was a regional server. Now I understand, that the size is just perfect for me 😄

@felix Ummm... sorry to barge in here, but instances.social/list/advanced= says there are 16401 users on nrw.social. Where did you get the 40 from?

instances.socialMastodon instances

@atomicpoet I run my own private instance. But admittedly, if someone gives me a ton of money for it, well...

@atomicpoet The biggest issue with federation is trust. Unless smaller instances market themselves as trustworthy, barely any new users will pick them. Many small instance admin teams are anonymous random people. This doesn't help. The biggest instances benefit from "everyone I know has picked them, so can't be bad" and "too big to fail". We as users have no real way to influence the masses and as bad as it makes me feel saying it, we need ... "influencers" for that.

@tobyx The way to fix this is to build a culture that values de-centralization. The notion of self-hosting and administrating your own instance should be normalized. We should embrace small.

@atomicpoet As you've posted, big money is coming in, acquiring instances already. But I think there's also going to be smaller players, funded organizations with boards instead of anonymous admins that promise a culture that people can subscribe to. Made sustainable by people paying for a service—just a small amount.

Just like with email where Gmail dominates, but it doesn't bother me too much. There's a healthy ecosystem for email out there for people who care and support smaller companies.

@atomicpoet Oh and I think many people will stay far away from running their own instances because social media is such a controversial topic in many legislations. The legal ramifications are insane.

@tobyx @atomicpoet
Apart of countries than ban some social media, I do not see the issues related with legislation. Maybe I'm not aware about some legal implications. Any practical example about it?

@char Germany for example has the NetzDG law which mandates the removal of hate speech among other things with big penalties if you don't react within 24 hours. On the other hand, it only applies to social networks with 2 million or more users. The law never considered federation however, so who wants to be the first prime case in court with the opposing side arguing total reach instead of local users? There's also copyright law (DMCA etc.) that opens you up for liability.

@tobyx
I see, it is complicated indeed; something for reflection.
I guess that the legislation will be updated to cover new upcoming situations like federation.

Thanks for sharing.

@tobyx
Thanks for sharing, very interesting article.

The "Two important notes" on it, basically their talk about "under U.S. law".
Makes me question if we have something like #eff on Europe, that will be more focus on European laws and it's idiosyncrasies.

@atomicpoet @tobyx we should find ways to monetize them like miners. Otherways they will eat us. There are no financial incentives to run own instance and now there is one - I potentially could be bouth by big fish.

without some kind of money it's a voluntary lose deal.

And why they should do it for free? Don't they deserve salary? Why they should work another job, aren't they instance valuable?

Or we want them to work for some corporation and managing instance on work-free hours?

@atomicpoet @tobyx Make no mistake, if/when 750m Twitter refugees sign into Mastodon, *those* will form the culture here more than anybody who's been around since 2017. Mastodon's Eternal September might only just have begun.

@atomicpoet @tobyx
I agree with your proposition.
I guess that one of the key points is how to bring to the non techie people a way to self-hosting and admin their own instance in a easy/no-pain way.

@atomicpoet @tobyx self-hosting is complex and most people do not have the requisite security skills to ensure the safety of themselves or any other users. If we get to the point of every person being represented by their own instance, everyone now has to moderate every instance.
I don't have answers, but I'm not convinced "just host your own" is the solution.

@toychicken @tobyx Right now, self-hosting has a big barrier to entry. But the future can change, and we should work towards that better future.

Either way, self-hosting should be encouraged. If you have the knowledge and means, do it!

@atomicpoet @tobyx I agree in terms of it being desirable to become easier, but the problem remains. As a self-hoster you're responsible for accepting / declining every single connection to you from the rest of the Fediverse. As a connection / follow request is simply a ping to an API, it's trivial to be swamped with requests of varying legitimacy. AFAIK Mastodon software does not validate if the data in the request comes from a 'real' instance. Hopefully this can be mitigated.

@toychicken @tobyx If you're concerned about who you're taking requests from, just connect with specific trusted instances on a whitelist. Pleroma makes this pretty straightforward.

@atomicpoet @tobyx the problem doesn't go away though. Just shifting outside the realm of your software. I guess this is ultimately the Achilles heel of federation. How do you know who to trust?
I appreciate this discussion though, thank you.

@toychicken @tobyx Honestly, I look at all these discussions as opportunities -- not merely barriers.