Recent moves by Eugen Rochko (known as Gargron on fedi), the CEO of Mastodon-the-non-profit and lead developer of Mastodon-the-software, got some people worried about the outsized influence Mastodon (the software project and the non-profit) has on the rest of the Fediverse.
Good. We should be worried.
Mastodon-the-software is used by far by the most people on fedi. The biggest instance, mastodon.social, is home to over 200.000 active accounts as of this writing. This is roughly 1/10th of the whole Fediverse, on a single instance. Worse, Mastodon-the-software is often identified as the whole social network, obscuring the fact that Fediverse is a much broader system comprised of a much more diverse software.
This has poor consequences now, and it might have worse consequences later. What also really bothers me is that I have seen some of this before.
I go on to dive a bit into the history of StatusNet (the software), OStatus (the protocol), and identi.ca (the biggest instance) on a decentralized social network “grandparent” of the Fediverse.
And draw an analogy to show why mastodon.social’s size, and Mastodon-the-software-project’s influence on broader fedi is a serious risk we need to do something about.
Yeah. I’ve also seen a lot of people point out that he’s kind of hijacking the whole networks branding with “mastodon” too. Because it’s not mastodon, it’s activitypub, the protocol and the network is activitypub, which one can use via an array of apps and clents and servers. But he acts like the whole is just his mastodon, mastodon, and mastodon. It’s like if google took over all the branding of the WWW and just pretended that the web is chrome, http is chrome, html is chrome, and there are no “web browsers” there is just chrome. That’s what he is doing with the activitypub network.