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@atomicpoet @Ciantic @dotnet @styx31 Well, no, it's @styx31, not @styx31, those are two different accounts.

And do you think that servers owned privately by employees are property of their employers?

@LouisIngenthron @Ciantic @dotnet @styx31 @styx31@dotnet.social When an employee runs the server, and an official account lives there, I tend to think there’s a relationship.

@atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @Ciantic @dotnet @styx31@mastodon.social @styx31
"I tend to think there’s a relationship"
...and correlation and causation are 2 different types of relationship.

@SmartmanApps Well, what do you mean by "all your data"? Because if it was work product, then the company actually does own that, usually, per the terms of the employment agreement.

@LouisIngenthron
Not work product, literally my personal data that I put on the system. It's literally owned by me, regardless of which medium it's residing on.

Also you're making assumptions about what was in my agreement anyway. I have a current agreement which specifically gives me retention of IP rights.

@LouisIngenthron @dotnet @fediversenews Look at when the account was created. Look at when the first message was sent.

Clearly, there’s been affiliation for a long time.

@atomicpoet @dotnet @fediversenews What does the account being created months ago have to do with whether or not they're affiliated? I don't see where you're making that leap. It makes sense they'd want to claim the name they'd eventually use early, even if they weren't prepared to commit to engaging yet. That doesn't mean they're affiliated with the server.

And that's on top of the fact that they've now expressly said they are not affiliated with it.

@LouisIngenthron @dotnet @fediversenews Well, I don’t believe them.

You don’t think Microsoft’s lawyers will send a cease and desist if their intellectual property weren’t violated?

You think Microsoft would park their official account there for 5 months if there weren’t some sort of relationship?

The reason it’s probably not “official” is because Microsoft likely doesn’t want blowback.

@atomicpoet Microsoft's developer network is extremely community-focused. This is absolutely inline with their past actions. There are hundreds of software packages available that use the .NET name as part of their branding, and Microsoft's lawyers have a history of going after none of them. Moreover, running an account instead of a server is the exact same way their marketing department works on every other social media, so why complicate things here unnecessarily?

Also, "blowback" from who or what?

I really think you're grasping at straws here.

@LouisIngenthron Surely you’re not unaware of how much of the Fediverse community views Microsoft, right?

@atomicpoet Not all of it apparently. I regularly interact with developers on here and haven't heard a hint of anti-Microsoft sentiment.

There are plenty of us .NET developers on Mastodon.

And anyone who hates Microsoft is free to defederate from dotnet.social.

@LouisIngenthron Maybe not all, but if I were Microsoft, I’d be worried about Fediblock.

@atomicpoet Mostly because Fediblock is an easily-manipulated relic that needs to go the way of the dinosaurs. Mastodon has outgrown it.

@LouisIngenthron I mean, that’s what someone from QOTO would say.

But marketers, especially of big companies, tend to be very paranoid of blowback and exercise caution.

I’m not saying that Microsoft owns dotnet.social.

But non-affiliation? I don’t buy that.

And clearly whoever owns dotnet.social works in lockstep with Microsoft’s marketing department—otherwise they wouldn’t put the account on that server.

@atomicpoet Or their marketing department tried to create an instance, saw how difficult it is to run on Windows, gave up, found a community instance already dedicated to their product run by an employee, reached out to him, and he was happy to have them, because of course he was if he was such a big fan that he started an instance dedicated to their product in the first place.

That's not only Occam's Razor here, but it's consistent with the story they've given.

And the unnecessary dig against my server isn't strengthening your argument; to the contrary.

@LouisIngenthron And lawyers were not involved? No higher ups signed off?

@atomicpoet What do either of those things have to do with your attempt to establish a relationship between the server and the company?

@LouisIngenthron That’s my point. A lawyer probably signed off, and someone with authority gave it a stamp of approval.

@atomicpoet *What* is your point?

Lawyers probably signed off on creating Twitter accounts (because Twitter actually has an EULA, unlike dotnet.social). Does that mean that Microsoft is in cahoots with Twitter too?

@LouisIngenthron Does a Microsoft employee own Twitter? Is Twitter a Microsoft product?

@atomicpoet Which has what exactly to do with lawyers signing off on the account? You're bouncing all over the place here.

@LouisIngenthron If you believe a $1T just improvises its social media presence—and doesn’t get a lawyer to sign off on something that establishes ground rules with the host—I don’t know what to tell you.

@atomicpoet If you want to continue this conversation, try replying to what I actually wrote instead of this nonsense argument you imagined me saying.

@highvizghilliesuit @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron it's entirely possible to use different software and add features, just on mastodon there's hometown and glitch-soc forks that add features (some I really like and miss). There's also many other apps like calckey and friendica that have entirely different feature sets. However, if Microsoft were to make a fork of mastodon, they have to make it Open source and I believe also gpl compliant.

@highvizghilliesuit @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron however, if they're activitypub compliant, you'll still see the posts on mastodon and the features you have. There's already @pixelfed that could easily add those filters in the future

@timelordiroh @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @pixelfed so likely if the userbase grows large enough, someone will at least attempt what I'm proposing, am I wrong? This is more like the difference between Signal or Whatsapp than Ethereum or Monero.

@highvizghilliesuit @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @pixelfed I would say it's already happened. Funkwhale allows you to listen to a shared library on the instance. Bookwyrm has book metadata. Calckey and some others have discord like post reactions. We all have our own feature sets, but can still talk a common language of activitypub. If you're on calckey, you could react to this mastodon post using an emote instead of replying to it.

@timelordiroh @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @pixelfed I guess what I meant was could one dominant instance capture enough of the userbase to effectively centralize the whole kit and kaboodle, (yes that's the correct spelling). Further research needed on my end though, it looks like.