People all the way down
The news of the week are, of course, Elongated Muskrat buying Twitter.
As usual, people tend to flock (lol) to Mastodon whenever anything happens to the birdsite, and it is happening again.
It is happening right now
I've used Mastodon before and, yes, I'm there again. The Fediverse has gotten much more interesting since and it has become clear that microblogging is only one of the possibilities. There's an ever-growing list of services that are surprisingly polished, ad-free and open-source. Anyone with some technical knowledge can host their own service, and that's how most of these services work.
As amazing as that is, it also exposes the main problem with anything decentralized: it's people all the way down. There are no big tech companies behind these services, but there's always the instance admins. Each server will have their own rules, so it's important to find one that agrees with you the most.
This isn't bad in itself but some communities can be more drama-prone than others – and you can absolutely find people being loud on Twitter about how Mastodon won't save us.
Shocking, I know.
And that is absolutely right, it won't. But I'll take this instead of big companies with a fiduciary duty to the shareholders anytime.
Speaking of which, what interesting times we're living in. While cryptobros want to convince you the web is broken and centralized, here we are, using a decentralized platform where anyone can have their own Twitter analog without a single blockchain or token in sight. Truly a sight to behold.