In every other aspect of society, choice is heralded as a good thing, a fundamental aspect of freedom even. We were supposed to believe that having a range of different brands of toothpaste is fundamentally a good thing, and people happily choose which ones they want. We vote, it’s freedom.

Fundamentally federation is freedom as compared to centralised networks that lock you in. You can choose where to go and you never get locked in because you can choose to move instances later on - in particular Mastodon lets you take your followers with you.

If people can’t spend 15 minutes making a decision on something they’re going to spend probably hundreds of hours a year on, what does that say?

People figured out email, and that’s essentially the same set of choices - you get an email provider, you don’t go to “centralemail.com” where you can only communicate with people on that same locked in-platform.

The whole thing about people “not wanting to pick an instance” is just a bad meme. It’s all about marketing and the fact Bluesky and its predecessors like Twitter and Facebook had the money to chuck around to attract people to the platform by e.g. paying off influencers to join.

It’s also the case that BS aspires to be a federated platform (see: ATProto) - apparently it wants exactly the same “problems” that Mastodon has!

But, you know, will inevitably do something shitty with respect to that because VC funding.

Trump’s gaggle of tech bros loves this opinion

Listen I just don’t have sympathy for it at this point. If people insist on maintaining iPad-only tech literacy then they can catch up with any average intelligence 4 year old.

Kind of like how I’d be pessimistic about sticking my fingers in the closing boot of a cybertruck yeah.

I think it’s more going to be more like twitter than they’re bargaining for.

I mean I get it. And network effects are a thing. But these VC backed/owned firms (like bluesky) are cancer. Fascism promoting, lying, grifting, you name it. Can we please just try a little harder to support the community efforts?

If you Google “sign up for mastodon” the first result you get is a sign-up page for mastodon.social which is the default instance. The sign up page is straight forward. I get we’re all coddled by iPads or whatever but this argument evades me.

The much, much bigger issue is people just flocking to where there’s the capital for marketing. The feature sets/philosophy could be precisely 1:1 swapped and people would still end up on the platform with all of the money to throw around.

What, the VC funded tech firm makes lots of noise about not being evil before eventually just becoming evil yet again pattern? Yeah I don’t like it either.

They’re all going to bluesky because for some reason as soon as social media gets involved, the wonderful human ability to pattern match just gets switched off.