Tried to explain to my tween daughter that Oracle and Walmart taking over TikTok was the dorkiest most uncool companies in America taking over the coolest company and they will ruin it. Crony capitalism is hard to translate to kids but I tried.
Surely the company behind Java applets, arcane enterprise databases, and insanely privacy invasive adtech teaming up with Walmart, a cathedral of soul-crushing consumerism, will ensure TikTok remains the most relevant app of the moment. Trump donors say so so it must be true.
If any TikTokker was young enough to have to endure the trauma of installing Oracle Java to run some garbage applet then this deal would never had gone through. They would’ve killed it just like they killed Trump’s Tulsa rally. Just saying.
Parent: Oracle is the bane of my professional existence. It makes me want to throw my computer out the window on the regular.
Child: What is Oracle? I hear they are taking over TikTok.
Trump solved a marginal data privacy concern after committing the most egregious mass data abuse scandal in history (remember his Cambridge Analytica, a sketchy international military contractor) by picking his donor cronies, Oracle and Walmart, to do bullshit tech nationalism.
Trump picking winners so that Oracle and Walmart collect your tweens data instead of the PRC is tech nationalism and crony capitalism in its most purest contemporary form. Microsoft would have been a better choice for privacy, but obviously that co isn’t sufficiently Trumpist.
Tech nationalism is real. Data sovereignty is real. Data protection enforcement is a joke across the globe. Parental anxiety about all this is real. Trump is exploiting it all for political gains. Does Biden even have a stance on #datarights? There’s a lot going on right now.
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The limits of owning your own infra to seize the means of production come down to who is keeping the bare metal alive on the rack.
Of course only a relatively small portion of the #fediverse is affected by this particular outage. The major servers are “unperturbed” and folks might have to notice that certain accounts aren’t active right now if they weren’t aware of this cluster outage on our host’s host.
This outage should be brief as OVH is on it. Feels like a small price to pay for the general ease-of-use afforded, otherwise. We also enjoy the GDPR by hosting in France. All technical choices made for building an alternate social media autonomy are essentially political.
Remarkable growth for an otherwise obscure open source decentralized platform with a singular appeal that Elon Musk cannot control it. These charts show the steep sudden growth of new Mastodon servers appearing to absorb the exodus precipitated by his takeover.
These charts don’t capture the astonishing brain drain, however. Until you make the effort to go see who has discovered another way, it’s hard to grasp why this place feels so suddenly different.
No longer have confidence that I could earn big engagement on this hellsite anymore. As of this tweet, the toot below was accumulating almost 300 boosts (retweets) and favourites (non-algorithmic likes). That kind of engagement costs money on here now. federate.social/@profcarroll/1…
💫Nerd Alert: Learned how to resolve my mastodon server issues and will be opening up federate.social for a new cohort of applicants today. Hoping to attract 50% newbies and 50% folks looking to jump off of a chaotic crowded big instance. Stay tuned. #GetFederated
Why join my #fediverse instance?
⛔️I’ve already blocked (defederated) several nasty servers for troll-free trust and safety.
🆘I respond to reports and enforce the clearly posted rules.
👨🏻💻Guidance and support learning a new way to do social media.
🌐A more focused federated feed
Things to consider:
💸If you plan on bringing a large follower base along, are you willing to chip in on computing costs? Say $8/mo?
📦When you move instances/servers, you leave your posts behind but you take your followers with you because it forwards on. I’ll walk you thru it.
OK I’ve seen enough from this poll. Let’s experiment with the #Fediverse together. Applications to join my new mastodon instance are now open. federate.social
Already have small core of familiars posting comparable content #OnThere at a steady clip along with all new voices I’ve never met before. I’ve been playing around for a weekend and already my notifications for masto have overtaken my twitter notifs. You have to work at it tho.
I know it’s sad to let go and endure sudden change. So many of us have invested so much of our life #OnHere. The problem for us is that it was always for sale. Even if it’s messy, masto is not for sale. Right now, and for what it’s worth, that’s a feature. Not a bug.