Instead of leaving Xitter, they left Mastodon. Proton's trend is not inspiring confidence and this feels like another step backwards.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Honest, stupid question: Why exactly is this such a big deal to so many of you? (I don't use Mastodon.)
Proton recently got shot in the foot when one of their board members said some stuff that made it sound like he was somehow not certain that fascists are bad for privacy. The guy responded and clarified and made some good points...and still very clearly did not realize or did not feel it important to mention or even imply that fascists are very definitely bad for privacy. This is still post-record-scratch for Proton.
So leaving what's basically the only social media of the future, such as it is, and sticking it out in the garbage heaps, makes two data points that make a line that goes in the direction of "definitely going to enshittify". It's possible this could be wrong, because two data points isn't huge, but these are also things that were extremely easy to get right, and require an oddly large amount of effort to fuck up like they have.
To me, the federated social network (Fediverse, which Mastodon is one portal into) offers some distinct advantages for pluralism. No single entity can control the whole discourse. When you don't agree with your mods, you can go elsewhere without losing your connections with people: just move to a different instance.
Furthermore it's not controlled by corporations, so there is no incentive of trying to spread things like the plague just to get you addicted and make as much money.
In practice the design of the Fediverse leaves some problems open (notably, moving between servers comes at a cost to the online identity you built, and getting bootstrapped if you don't have real-life connections who are interested is more difficult) and it even creates some interesting problems of its own. But all in all it's better already than the mono-idea, "there is one norm everyone should stick to" culture we see on commercial offerings.