#googlemail — Public Fediverse posts

@Jon I guess this has got a lot to do with the demographic change in the Fediverse. It is now mainly populated by people whom it seems to never have really been intended for.

Around the time when #Mastodon started, when even #ActivityPub didn't exist, the #Fediverse mostly consisted of #Friendica and #Hubzilla which tried to federate with as many platforms as possible, microblogging platforms based on #StatusNet which had an open API that Friendica and Hubzilla could connect to, plus #Diaspora which, while federated internally, was a #WalledGarden towards the outside until Friendica cracked its data structure open.

In those days, your typical Fediverse user was an übergeek. The vast majority of people especially on Friendica and Hubzilla had #Linux on all their devices, sometimes including smartphones (Nokia N900 or N9, anyone?), and they were not only familiar with #FLOSS, but they often flat-out refused to use proprietary, commercial, #NonFree, #ClosedSource software. When they looked into the package managers of their Linux distributions, they saw a vast world of free and #OpenSource software spread before their eyes. The primary instant messaging platform of choice was #XMPP.

Not exactly few hosted their own private (or sometimes public) Friendica nodes or Hubzilla hubs. Setting up a #LAMP stack wasn't too big an issue for many. While #Twitter and #Facebook were for normies, and Diaspora* was increasingly turning into a #hipster hive, Friendica and Hubzilla were for the tech-savvy FLOSS nerds. Even the leftist activists who also populated Friendica fell into this category. And when Mastodon was launched, it was mostly targetted at these very same people.

The more popular Mastodon became, the more this changed. And these days are completely over since the #TwitterMigration.

Your typical Fediverse user nowadays uses #Windows and/or an #iPhone, some may use a smartphone with manufacturer-issued #Android. They're largely non-techies who have never in their lives knowingly (or, in the case of many iPhone users, ever) directly used free, open-source software. They don't know such stuff exists, they don't know what it is, and they don't care, also because it's too technical for them to even want to know about it.

They've also only ever used commercial, centralised, monolithic online platforms developed, owned and operated by #GAFAM and other Silicon Valley giants, not simply because it's convenient, not simply because that's what everyone does, but mostly because they neither know nor care that alternatives exist. Or even could possibly exist. The entire concept of online platforms not run by big American corporations is alien to them, the conccept of online platforms split into various instances run by independent entities even more so. Some even seem to be convinced that e-mail is a centralised, corporate service exclusively owned and run by #Google because all they know is #GoogleMail.

This was all nice and cosy and convenient until #ElonMusk came along and bought out the #birbsite. Worse yet, he started gradually turning it into a virtual Führerhauptquartier.

When someone recommended mastodon.social to them as a replacement, they took it for the website of another Silicon Valley-based, commercial, profit-oriented start-up offering another proprietary, centralised, monolithic online service. That was all they knew and all they could possibly imagine. Basically, they expected Twitter without Musk, but otherwise 100% Twitter.

What they found themselves on instead was a world completely alien to them. No corporate monolith, but a platform run by a German non-profit. Not everyone is on the same website. There are more of these "Mastodon websites," all with the same brand on them, most run by private people. They're called "instances." And they're all connected. No corporation that owns and develops and operates everything and issues the only mobile app you're allowed to use. In fact, they were quickly recommended to use Mastodon through an app that is not named Mastodon. They'd never in their lives used an online service through a mobile app with a different name. This, too, was completely alien to them and still is to many.

So this is the Fediverse. Or so they thought. Because it got worse.

It was hard enough to grasp the concept of decentral instances of the same project being united in a network with absolutely no central infrastructure whatsoever. But then the evidence became clearer that there is even more on the Fediverse than all those Mastodon instances. There are instances of entirely different projects that aren't Mastodon at all, but that can still communicate with Mastodon instances.

Not only did they have to cope with thousands of big and small Twitters connected with one another. But on top of that, they basically had posts on their timelines from people who weren't on one of these Twitters at all, but instead on a little Facebook or a little Instagram, and yet, they could post to Twitter from this little Facebook or Instagram. And again, there were many of these as well, not only one each.

However, the old guard hasn't left. They're still there. And their mindset is still the same. And this mindset collides with that of those many for whom Mastodon was their very first step out of their commercial IT bubble, who'd rather stay inside that bubble, but who were chased away by an overt Nazi supporter.

You can actually see how these mindsets clash. Some more recent Fediverse users complain about "too much Linux talk" on their timelines or in their corner of the Fediverse. And not exactly few don't want there to be anything else than Mastodon in the Fediverse. Not to mention those Twitter converts who want there to be more central services in the Fediverse for convenience vs. those FLOSS-loving Fediverse veterans who strongly oppose and even actively combat any centralised structures in the Fediverse for security and data privacy reasons.

The non-techy newcomers on their pre-installed Windows laptops and iPhones who'd rather have a full-blown Twitter clone (minus Nazis) are the vast majority, especially on Mastodon. However, the tech-savvy, security-aware, FLOSS-loving übergeeks who run Linux on second-hand, sticker-bombed ThinkPads still have the last word. For it's them who build and run the Fediverse, and it's them who have the competence to do so.

Imagine Microsoft messing Windows up so much that a mass exodus of users towards Linux starts, users who, like so many before them, expect desktop Linux to be identical to Windows, just free-of-charge and with no malware and without whatever Microsoft messed up. Or imagine a mass exodus from #WhatsApp and/or #Discord to #Matrix. In both cases, the situation would be pretty much the same.