I’m afraid you might be right!

What’s your theory?

My nightmare goes like this:

• Some form of spam and plain wrongdoing will emerge with the rise of awareness about this fediverse thing.
• To cut a long story short: then some form of control will have to be put in place - like spam filters, blacklists, server whitelists and the like - and the hole thing goes the way of the email and the usenet, making it almost impossible to keep a server as an independent hobbyist.
• Some cleaver provider will offer a free $ervice and enforces the control techniques mentioned above reinforcing its use and closing the circle.

My hope:

• This thing will “never fly” and consequently only really committed and interesting people will linger. Great!
• A second best hypothesis is becoming the second best forever - the best place to be, like linux.
• The fediverse community gets really large and popular and has so many servers and services that it becomes impossible to capture by a single giant player.
• People will “see it coming” and vote intelligently with their feet refusing the big players and choosing freedom instead. Hahahaha!..

No, I’m not sure of that. And the idea that it’s just a scam is what’s bugging me.

That’s my feeling as well, but… really? Randal Schwartz is hoping for me to follow him back?! The guy is a legend, I’m no one (literally - Ninguém means “no one” in portuguese).

As @floo@retrolemmy.com said, I can’t see a way for it to be nefarious except if it is some new kind of spam. But Randal wouldn’t exactly fit in “new people joining the platform without really understanding exactly how following people and following hashtags on mastodon is different than how it worked on Twitter or Instagram.”

Bah! I’ll just leave them there until they get tired of my boring conversations. 😁

NOSTR clients?

Hum!..

Maybe, I don’t know. I’m not familiar with how ATProto works. But the ATProto is not very “decentralized”, is it? Or is it just a case of not many people caring to link their instances to ATProto servers?

Maybe the problem I described earlier?

It lacks the Firefox bookmarks integration, I guess… :-)

That said, I foresee that all of those that now host a shinny mastodon or lemmy instance would not be as many - plain command line, no visuals, boring server stuff is a lot less sexy. But those could just link their instances to a server (they could host themselves as well, of course).

Maybe this is already happening and I fail to recognize it?.. How do you host a lemmy instance, for instance? Aren’t there “services” supporting your instance?.. I honestly don’t know.

See above (sorry, should have replied to your post, had I not get confused with the fact that later posts appear above earlier ones).

Quite the opposite…

Usenet was decentralized. Email is decentralized.