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@PCMag

To attack, the attackers will want Mastodon to consolidate. Powers will want few servers they need to exploit.

Small tech companies will launch "friendly" "easy-to-use" proprietary Mastodon instances, which will look community friendly. They will buy up communities that they can.

Major tech companies will embrace, extend, and extinguish to kill off large sections of the network.

"Figures playing games", will continue, cf: I Hunt Sys Admins

theintercept.com/document/2014

The InterceptI Hunt Sys Admins - The InterceptFearless, adversarial journalism that holds the powerful accountable.

@jebba @PCMag This is a good point.

Mastodon likes to be compared to email, and I think it’s a good comparison.

Google attempted the same thing with Gmail, and was pretty successful. Outlook probably controls the other large portion of emails for businesses.

@scottrobbins @PCMag

Yes, email is a great example.

They just flooded email with junk so people would consolidate.

For years, nearly all spam was from (easily) exploited windows workstations spammers compromised. This helped Microsoft and Google.

Yet admins weren't allowed to fight back. I could have written a script to power off every Windows machine that hit my servers that I knew was compromised. But that would have been illegal. So one just had to sit there and be attacked.

@scottrobbins @jebba @PCMag there are already shared lists of servers recommended to be banned. So this is a possible scenario.

@PCMag

I forgot to include lawfare. They can just make it too expensive for anyone to host by changing the law. Or by exploiting copyright law. Notice how someone violating copyright on music may get their house run over by a bearcat? They'll wreck grandma? Bankrupt people over sharing music? But how AI and other big tech companies can just steal everyone's content and violate licenses with impunity? They'll just find a way to turn the screws if it becomes a threat to their power.

@PCMag A decent article, made readable through adblock. I don't know how regular people read articles like this with an ad every other paragraph. :\

Whatever happened to just ads on the side, or at the bottom of an article?

@PCMag Asstodon actually does exist. It's a hashtag for sharing cute donkey pictures 🙂

@PCMag Elon following me on Instagram. After banning me.
I’ve been spreading the love about him all over social media. Billionaires need to be reckoned with right now!

@PCMag forgets, yet again, that Mastodon is only one of many applications that exists in the #Fediverse. Even if Mastodon were to turn evil, or fire their volunteer contributors, or insert ads, or (horrors!) allow searching there are a dozen other microblogs I can use, like GNUsocial, Pleroma, Friendica, and even non-text apps like Pixelfed or PeerTube. All without losing my social graph to walled, proprietary infrastructure.