Po polsku: szmer.info/post/178387

NOTE: A “long” text about capitalism and microblogging.

For the current wave of #Twitter migrants, #Mastodon is the obvious first choice, for at least a few reasons.

• Minds moulded by microblogging feel at home in a similar environment, with a bit more freedom than Twitter gave them.

• Mastodon's de facto monopolistic position within #Fediverse and a powerful (in Fediverse scale) user population ensure relatively easy migration and satisfy the sense of belonging important to most users.

• Mastodon's unparalleled (mainstream-provided) financial and marketing backing means that, so far, most newcomers have had the perception (familiar from the days of Internet Explorer) that “Fediverse = Mastodon”. Not all of them even belatedly discover that this is not the case. Brand recognition is undoubtedly Mastodon's strongest competitive advantage over the rest of the Fediverse.

This is still evident now, when one reads tips addressed to Fediverse users, while relating to Mastodon-specific features.

Dead is Twitter, long live Mastodon®?

With the growing drama surrounding the transformation of Twitter into Musk's private homestead (nothing special from a capitalist perspective), I noticed the beginnings of a much more interesting process that could mean that Mastodon may take Twitter's place in more than one respect.

The first clear sign for me was a dramatic statement by Mastodon's owner, who, in a rather humorous dispute with the mastodon.technology admin, firmly declared that Mastodon is a registered trademark not only as a software name, but also as part of a social networking web address. In his opinion, no one is entitled to use an address containing the word “mastodon” if there is a software of this kind, other than Mastodon®, running at that address.

The matter had become even more grotesque when it turned out that even if any rights to this name are reserved, it is valid only within the EU. There is no trace of such a claim in the US (and presumably the rest of the world).

This event, however, indicates that the CEO of Mastodon GmbH has moved from ignoring other platforms that co-create the Fediverse as the digital commons to enclosing and actively defending the territory he considers his turf. Using, albeit clumsily for now, a hard-core capitalist narrative and tools. Already somewhat familiar with his rhetoric (with the famous fork off), I expect further interesting developments in this area.

EEE: Embrace, Enhance, Exterminate?

The wave of Twitter migration has just begun. For now, it manifests itself primarily in the reactivation of dormant profiles, established and partially abandoned on previous occasions. As Musk begins to tighten his control, more and more new users, individual and institutional, will come in. For the reasons I mentioned at the beginning, they will most likely join existing Mastodon instances, or start their own.

And here's another interesting thing: the title “Mastodon & Fediverse” appears more and more often in the narrative aimed at new users. In places, there are also phrases like “Mastodon social network”. Apparently there is a shift from “Mastodon is Fediverse” to “Mastodon is Mastodon, and Fediverse is Fediverse”.

In the context of Mastodon's owner's attempts to “fence the commons,” this could mean a tendency to spin off the “Mastodon social network” and to turn it into an enclosed pasture, not unlike early Twitter.

The competitive advantages I mentioned at the beginning give a pole position for this process.

But how do you carve out a piece of a decentralized network, based on open software and open protocol, when its nodes are owned by independent entities that can, if they so wish, use whatever software they want?

With help here comes the EEE strategy. As Wikipedia puts it:

“Embrace, extend, and extinguish” (EEE), also known as “embrace, extend, and exterminate”, is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.

The strategy's three phases are:
1. Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
2. Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
3. Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.

Mastodon is known for hard-coded “conscious design decisions”, as its owner calls them. Are we to expect more of them, pursuing the strategy of “enclosing” Mastodon and turning it into a Twitter-bis? We will most likely find out sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, we still have a whole, chaotic and unowned Fediverse at our disposal. May it flourish and grow in its diversity.

#DigitalCommons #Enclosure #Capitalism