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Substack is not a suitable alternative to Twitter.

If Elon Musk can buy Twitter, he can buy Substack.

However, Elon Musk cannot buy the Fediverse. No one company owns it. It is not for sale.

At this point, if a social network refuses to join the Fediverse, I’m not interested.

Anyone trying to build yet another proprietary walled garden is just a mini-Musk.

You do not need a billionaire or a VC fund to use social media.

They are just middlemen opportunists trying to insert themselves between you and your friends.

The Internet was built to make it easy for you to connect with others, and that is getting easier with protocols like ActivityPub.

You don’t need Elon Musk. You don’t need Mark Zuckerberg. You certainly don’t need any Silicon Valley tech bro to let you use social media.

To people who say that Elon Musk won't buy Substack because he could "barely afford" to buy Twitter: Substack is no unicorn.

Substack's current valuation sits at $585 million.

That might be an over-estimation because its revenue for the entirety of 2022 was probably $18.6 million.

Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. He can assuredly buy Substack if he wanted it.

theverge.com/2023/3/28/2366047

I've worked for a social media start-up before. In fact, I was an early employee at a well known one. I know how this goes.

Founders start with the best of intentions.

But then VCs start making demands. And at that point, startups go for the fastest, easiest method to acquire revenue growth. That is, if they want to stay on board.

A good many of them take their exit as soon as it becomes available. Just look at Instagram and WhatsApp.

If Elon Musk walked into Substack's office right now (probably with a sink) and offered them $585 million to buy it, do you think their shareholders would say "No"?

Not on their life.

They would be skipping for joy. Everyone who owns equity in Substack would be popping open bottles of champagne.

Meanwhile, all those writers that Substack is paying will now be under Musk's thumb -- yet again.

This is why the Fediverse is the better choice compared to Substack.

Some folks might be thinking, “Unlike the Fediverse, Substack gives writers an opportunity to get paid.”

Not so fast.

When @TexasObserver was nearly shut down because they lacked funding for operations, they turned to the Fediverse for help.

Within 48 hours, we helped them raise $250,000 in funding—and now that 70-year-old newspaper still lives.

As a result, 17 journalists still have their jobs.

Chris Trottier

🤣

“But Elon Musk could buy all 23,000 Fediverse servers and do the same thing here!”

I assure you that my servers are not up for sale. And from speaking to numerous other admins, they won’t be selling either.

You see, for the same reason people play basketball because it’s fun—not because they want a $50 million NBA contract—many of us run and operate Fediverse servers.

But it’s amazing that some people can’t imagine doing things without a profit motive.

Imagine if people asked the silly “How do you make money?” question about other hobbies.

“You play chess. How do you make money from it?”

“You eat cheese. How do you make money from it?”

“You own a cat. How do you make money from it?”

Maybe I do these things for their own sake—because they give me joy.

The difference between Substack and my Fediverse servers is that Substack has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to generate profit.

I do not.

@atomicpoet then again, if someone were to offer me $50 million to stop being a satirical online “troll”, I would seriously consider it.

@troll5 Look at this guy with big league ambitions!

@atomicpoet it’s under $5 million per follower. And I have some valuable followers!

@troll5 @atomicpoet Yeah, ok, I do a buck per , per lifetime. But maybe that's too much. If you all could settle on a coin, I could setup a payment system, but until then, not even OAUTH2.1.
Bye.

Tim

@atomicpoet and even if he *did* buy all existing instances, setting new ones up is trivial and migration between instances is possible, easy even. All these fedi users already understand instances, and probably understand migration.

The garden is not nearly as walled.

Also, let's put the $585m in perspective: that's ~75 times less than he paid for :birdsite:. It's about a third of :birdsite: 's annual interest payments.

@atomicpoet >Imagine if people asked the silly “How do you make money?” question about other hobbies.

I wish I could only imagine. I get asked the same question whenever I start a new hobby or whenever I do something for fun

@atomicpoet On a less financial point, the issue I have with it is that it's not really comparable to , it's more like a blogging platform. Which isn't, in itself, a bad thing, but it's not a twitter replacement.

@lemonflavoured @atomicpoet

Please don't follow me and "Like" my server. It's for my code backup, not your pleasure, but if there are links you like, please follow the link. I'm sure the artist would appreciate it.

Tim
tecreations.ca

@atomicpoet The other name for "shareholders" is parasites…

@devnull Not if they are activist shareholders. They can definitely be trusted to force change from the inside. @atomicpoet

@lucywildboots Parasites' role is to make as much as possible from other people's work and from the planet resources. It's litteraly their main, if not the only, reason to live·

There's no way they're going to actively make sure to "sacrifice" their profit for ethical reasons…

Being an activist and being a capitalist are mutually exclusive…

@atomicpoet

@atomicpoet And this is the bottom line. You just summed up everything that's wrong with the model of capitalism that America follows, in one thread.

Imagine if instead of having an IPO to get their payday after building a business, the founders instead sold the company to the workers or customers, and it was converted to a co-op. Suddenly the motive from start to finish becomes building value for the community, period. No more shady manipulations, where customers are frogs in a warming pot, becoming nothing more than resources to mine.

Imagine if all businesses either stayed privately owned or went this route. No more swinging, crashing stock markets. No more billionaire oligarchs living on financial rent. No more treating human beings like livestock milked for their money by strangers so far removed that they can't remember the humanity of those they are exploiting.

@hosford42 @atomicpoet

You just described capitalism.
No money, you die isn't a system. It's murder. It's also the base of the capitalism pyramid scheme. Oligarchs pay us to do labor they won't then LITERALLY CHARGE US just to be ALIVE. All that "pay" just gets channelled right back to them.

@MysticaRose @atomicpoet That's exactly my point! But it's not all forms of capitalism. It's capitalism as we practice it. We can do better!

@hosford42 @atomicpoet

No. It's CAPITALISM. No money, you die is the core of it. The next level in the pyramid scheme is "war is good for business". Read, death = profits.

The oligarchs "pay" you to do the work they don't want to and the CHARGE you for your very SURVIVAL. That "pay" gets channelled back up to those very same oligarchs.

@hosford42 What you are describing can be referred to as #ExitToCommunity ! Perhaps you are already aware of it, perhaps others aren't. It's a cool concept!

#e2c

@atomicpoet

/cc @Marc

@clacke @atomicpoet @Marc No, I wasn't aware of the term. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

@hosford42 @atomicpoet

@clacke is right to bring up E2C. It's an interesting attempt to align incentives in a more broadly rewarding way. If an E2C isn't valuable for its workers, it isn't valuable financially for the founder of the E2C.

@atomicpoet Even if he buys all your servers, he would be buying the hardware and maybe the admins time. For me, the differentiator here is that he would not be able to buy my own server and I retain the privilege of blocking all of his servers and continue being in the Fediverse without a trace of his decissions on any of my Fediverse services.

@atomicpoet “Where’s the profit motive” mfs getting upset when I hang out with my friends without charging them for it

@atomicpoet My partner and I own cats. Plus we run a cat boarding facility which is very profitable.

@atomicpoet This ✅ I blogged about this during the pandemic. Always nice to see someone share what I thought was a fringe opinion

imarc.co.uk/2021/03/12/monetis

iMarcMonetising HobbiesBy Marc

@atomicpoet
I DON'T need to imagine, they already did, also add the "... but if you don't make money why you WASTE your time on .. " ..

Wait just a LITTLE longer and they'll start asking "Why don't you use ChatGTP for that ?" .. and/or why you waste time THINKING on that ?

Erm .. to LEARN something ?

I think I have a "new" reply for this ( stolen ) "We choose to do XXX and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," ..

@atomicpoet I get this. I create art for myself and have no intention of ever making money from my work.

@atomicpoet Sure, but to play devil's advocate, he could buy both Fastly and Cloudflare, kick off anybody who uses them to protect their ActivityPub server and then all these admins would be open to state-sponsored DDOS attacks.

@mohaneds @atomicpoet this suggests a problem with cloudflare, not Activity Pub

@atomicpoet

having a place where ideas flow freely and the best can go viral no matter what the powerful/wealthy think about them, is culturally important. what Elon claimed he believed in but has proven not to. fun, sure. but this confusion over goals imo is what lets assholes like Elon justify jokes at other people's expense. humor is necessary but there's a cruelty that then muddies the water regarding just unpopular opinions and what might be true, and ultimately deters engagement.

Just for the record, if any billionaire wants to buy my instance, I’m entirely down with that.

I will then open a new one the very next day. :).

@atomicpoet if he tried then I could see some people selling out, because there will always be some. He's arrogant enough to not bother trying though, IMHO.

@atomicpoet If Elon bought all 23,000 Mastodon Servers today, at least 23,000 new ones would pop up tomorrow.

@atomicpoet I would like to assure everyone that I would absolutely sell Chinwag for just a few million dollars without hesitation.

If anyone has a few million kicking around, please DM me. This weekend would be great, I don't have a lot on.

@atomicpoet It's not their fault they can't imagine doing anything w/o a profit. They've been raised under predatory capitalism. It's what they know.

The underlying assumption here, btw, is not as much that everything has a profit motive, but that every entity has shadowy moneyed owners who can be bought out by a zillionaire against the will and interests of the people who have been visibly working for the entity.

The capitalists' euphemism for this is the vulture capital system, but in the context of other historic societies, such as Soviet Russia or Imperial Rome, it was called political patronage.

@atomicpoet I’m supportive. But I’m also kind of amazed that anyone thinks operating a server is fun. To me that would be on a par with fun visits to the dentist or happy encounters with a tax auditor.

@atomicpoet He could buy them, and we could start new servers and move to them and defederate him.

What he can’t do is make me partake in his club, I won’t sit at his table.

@cstross @atomicpoet I honestly think the 'Faithful' see Love as just another transaction. They keep tabs, memorise the receipts....and then wonder why the divorce papers come!

@cstross @atomicpoet @Lazarou

I'm not sure if capitalism is directly its own religion or if its a consequence of Christianity?

My current guess is that Christianity gave Europeans an excessive sense of their own superiority. With that they then went out and conquered the Americas and Africa with colonialism, and imposed the economic system called capitalism.

The three Cs seem deeply connected in hard to separate ways.

As examples:

Is it even possible to separate americas work obsession from the Protestant work ethic?

The American wealthy classes seem to be heavily invested in spreading prosperity theology.

@alienghic @cstross @Lazarou Just want to point out that capitalism is a recent thing, and has only been with us ~300 years.

Whereas Christianity has been around for ~2,000 years.

Also, like many things, the West appropriated Christianity from elsewhere. Ethiopia has been a Christian nation for much longer than England, for example.

@atomicpoet @cstross @Lazarou

The reason I'm thinking that there's a relationship is the Europeans seemed to have two major priorities when conquering the Americas looking for loot and imposing Christianity.

It seems like after running out of easy to find loot in the Americas, they used the wealth from that loot to start the transatlantic slave trade, and here again the slavers frequently used Christianity to justify subjugating non-christian populations.

I saw an argument suggesting that funding Columbus was an example of an early capitalist like activity.

The already rich Spanish royalty used their wealth to fund Columbus' high risk, high return venture in a way similar to more modern venture capitalism.

They lacked the legal advancements of the limited liability joint stock corporation, so it's not as developed as modern capitalism, but does arguably represent a capitalist like enterprise.

I think most people would agree that later ventures enterprises like the Northwest Territories company or the East India company were quite similar to modern capitalist companies and were major implementers of colonialism.

Christianity, colonialism, and capitalism are major themes in western history, and they all intertwined with each other in ways that my understanding of history is inadequate to tease apart.

@alienghic @cstross @Lazarou What you're referring to is mercantilism, and it was definitely a motivating factor in colonialism and well as the creation of capitalism. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercanti

en.wikipedia.orgMercantilism - Wikipedia

@atomicpoet @cstross @Lazarou

I could stand to understand the relationship between mercantilism and capitalism better.

@atomicpoet @alienghic @Lazarou @cstross Armenia (in Europe) and Ethiopia were both successfully evangelized at by Christians ("appropriated Christianity") within decades after Jesus's supposed death.

Rome resisted until the emperor was successfully converted, and the new Christian power base evangelized at or conquered the rest of the continent over the course of the next 1000 years.

@clacke @alienghic @Lazarou @cstross Constantine could have just as easily chose Manichaeism instead of Christianity. Perhaps if that happened, Europeans would have revered Mani instead of Jesus instead.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichae

en.wikipedia.orgManichaeism - Wikipedia