Preach. I'm happy to only hang out with the sort of people who see the value in social media by the people and for the people. Sometimes it's messy, some of us are kinda annoying, but it's always going to be better than corpo shit.

The Fediverse is decentralized, which means that it cannot (or at least it would be very, very difficult) be shut down by anyone. On an individual level, any user is free to start their own instance or community with their own rules in place should another instance or community become undesirable. If there is something you don't like or that is somehow stifling to you, start your own and make it the way you want it.

That anyone can run a node. I could put one in my basement.

• Everyone can create an instance (Well, at least anyone who can pay for a domainname and hosting, which is the basic requirement for every webservice)
• As default, instances federate with each other
• Instances that are bad neighbors get defederated

That's it, basically. Even if someone bought up all instances and domainnames (which would require that server admins sell them, which i can't see many doing, or else they wouldn't run a fediverse service in the first place), there's nothing stopping you from creating a new instance outside of the control of this person the same day. It literally cannot be simply taken over by, say, Microsoft.

What is there to protect the Fediverse from control?

Why do you think people want it to have no control?

4chan exists, people would go there if they want a lawless wasteland. Or that weird 4chan ripoff that gets spammed every couple months here. Plebbit? They change the name constantly

And there's fringe instances where they claim to want that lawlessness, but look at their modlogs and they stamp out anyone who disagrees with them. So you can try an "anarchist" instance if hypocrisy is ok with you..

But your question is coming from a very unpopular perspective.

The vast amount of people want someone in control because otherwise it's just a bunch of trolls who don't have a choice if they use the big platforms, because they're IP banned from there.

Fediverse will always have a way for the dregs to get in, so having someone with "control" is necessary. Otherwise normal people leave....

nothing. it's at the mercy of the instance admins or those who host the instances.

if at some point they get bought up, or decide to collude, you won't have any options.

they are also subject to the national laws in which their servers reside.

people forget, reddit started as a server in someone's basement too in 2005. it was a start up, then it got purchased by conde nast in 2006, who started advertising it. i found reddit in 2007 as part of Wired's website feed.

reddit was niche until the mid 2010s, it became a top 10 website in 2017-2018, and now is 7th most popular site on the internet, just behind twitter/x.

Oh, I hear you. I just scolded all the bloodthirsty folks on the post of the hunter getting killed by the elephants. I await that massive downvoting, nevermind I'm one of the few (only?) wildlife rescue people on this platform. The dude seemed innocent and law abiding and well liked in the local community where he was savagely killed and people here are cheering.

It's also getting pretty sketchy with all the Israel comments. I've always been pro-Palestine, but every day the comments seem to be a little less anti-Israel colonialism and more to the Jews secretly run the world and all Jews support zionism side of things. There is so much gatekeeping in the news and political groups here. I really hesitate to participate anymore, which is a shame compared to how things felt at the API Exodus.

I felt pretty far left before I joined up here. I might still be. I was interested in anarchism and communism before spending so much time here. Now I'm not anti that stuff, but yeah, I don't need to hear any more about it right now. I'll keep doing my own thing over here and I'm fine being unaffiliated with a label on what my beliefs are.

Everyone was so scared of being a bad mod, but mods are what keep us from getting to where good users move out because the ones that chase them out while not technically breaking community rules do their thing. It's a thankless job, and that's why I have no desire to be one, but I am forever greatful for good mods.

I largely agree with you, which is why I decided to participate in this post. I felt you were just losing the focus a bit from the frustration you came in with and from some of the people arguing with you here.

Like you said, I'd love to see more community building and the growth of actual movements here, but I don't know if that can be done on a generalist platform. I've got 6000+ subscribers here, and like I said, I'd say maybe a dozen of those users have actually been moved to do something. I don't begrudge the ones that are just "cute pic!" and move on with their day. If this was a comment section on www.progressiveleftycauses.com, I could be mad, but that's not what this is. I think it's important to maintain realistic expectations for a social platform. Everybody can easily jump in with a joke or a complaint, but getting strangers to do stuff is really hard. Hell, I can't even get most people to actually reply with "Great pic!" It just is what it is.

There's still nothing stopping you or I from pushing out agendas here. But that also goes for the jokers and the party crashers. I do agree that this platform may lose the inertia to become a practical haven for progressive causes as its major purpose, but it can always still support some of that.