Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a start, but my concern is that the volunteer militia will get swamped and burnt out when the real attacks come. Right now Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms are too small for a Cambridge Analytica / Russian FSB or other similar caliber actors to bother with. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. are where most of the users are so that's where most of the effort will go. If these platforms ever "tip" into m…
I'm on masto regularly and the community is much more pleasant there (than say Twitter). A lot of users attribute that pleasantness to decentralization. I call BS. It's because it's a tiny self-selected group that wants the opposite of what Twitter provides. You're absolutely right: once this tips, and people join because that's what you have to join to talk to people and not because they're looking for a real change…
It's cyclical.
- The internet and online communities (BBSes) started out decentralized.
- Then came AOL / Compuserve / etc. Centralized platforms.
- The web broke up those platforms and shuffled everything around.
- Then the current Google / Facebook / Twitter megaplatforms arose and that's the state we're in.
So it's logical that we're ready for a decentralized cycle but over time, users will forget why decentralization is good and another big platform will rise.