Beware Of Meta Offering Gifts To Mastodon
At some point, every internet service goes away. Anyone looking at Twitter’s activities over the last six months is going to come to the conclusion that the activities of Elon Musk have accelerated this process. In which case, what will fill the void?
For some, the answer is Mastodon, a decentralised social network built around microblogging and echoing Twitter’s service. There was a notable increase in the population of the Fediverse matching the descent of Twitter into the madness of its current owner.
As Twitter’s decline continues, chief rival Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, amongst other properties) is considering its next move. Much of Meta’s revenue comes from taking your eyes and your attention and selling it to advertisers (the same is, of course, true of Twitter). If everyone moves to the open-sourced and decentralised Mastodon, then the VC-funded attention economy cannot capture that attention for its own profit.
It comes as no surprise to me that Meta is working on its own decentralised network (the codename appears to be P92). Neither does it come as a surprise that it will talk to the cloud of Mastodon servers in the Federated Universe using the ActivityPub standards. After all, you go where your customers are, and get them signed up to your service.
