I know, right? That's why investigative journalism is such a thankless, frustrating job. You need to prove beyond any doubt things that are often pretty obviously true.
Roman Anin and the rest of the IStories team did an absolutely amazing job. Found court documents going years back. Dug up signed statements and contracts. They did something nobody in the infosec community seemed to have done: actually looked at the IP addresses used by Telegram and followed that lead to its logical conclusion. And then published all of the receipts!
And still people will say this is "unsubstantiated" or find other ways to wave this off.
And yet this does move the needle. There is now proof of things we kinda sorta knew was probably true for years. It doesn't sound like much perhaps, but it's really important.
Again, as I wrote in my blogpost, one of the problems was that Ulanoff conflated fedi and Mastodon. You are not writing this on Mastodon, but you are writing this on fedi. This is something that Ulanoff missed completely.
Anyway, as I said, you are welcome to interpret stuff anyway you like. To me, his piece was just hilariously lazy, conventional to an almost self-parody level "tech journalism", and that's what I call him out on in my blogpost.
I am not saying Mastodon-the-software-project has no issues, I am not saying fedi has no issues – I talk about those issues in other places at length. But "Shatner could not find me and 'toot' sounds silly therefore this network will not survive" is a take that needs to be pointed at and laughed at when it comes from someone so high up on the tech journalism ladder.
Well, there was a way to say "Mastodon isn’t a viable mass market Twitter replacement and it wouldn’t become that without significant changes." It's literally that.
It is also pretty noticeably different than saying "Mastodon won't survive."
Not only that, by Ulanoff also compares Mastodon to a social network that did in fact "poof out into thin air", Peach.
You may of course do all sorts of gymnastics when interpreting his piece, but I take what he said at face value. And the fact that he responded to my thread on fedi and admitted he was wrong (kudos for doing that, by the way!) seems to confirm my face-value reading was closer to his intended message when the piece was published.
Yeah. Thankfully, Fediverse is a bunch of independent projects. There are Pleroma, different Misskey forks, Lemmy, kbin, Pixelfed, Loops, GoToSocial, and dozens more.
Mastodon is still probably the biggest, user-count-wise, but if Mastodon does a real stupid, there's going to be a fork that takes over the mindshare and the instances. This happened with OpenOffice → LibreOffice when the former got taken over by Oracle; this happened with XFree86 → X.org. This happened with ownCloud → Nextcloud.
And there are projects like FediPact, explicitly opposed to having anything to do with Meta on an instance level.
Yup. Up until roughly the times of early Twitter, federated, decentralized communication systems were the obvious norm to any engineer designing one.
Twitter was even meant to be federated and decentralized. I had interviewed one of their first engineers (this piece is about BlueSky, and in Polish; the Twitter thing is important background), who was there and working on that in the very early days. They had a proof of concept. But then the VCs got involved and the decision was that it would be harder to make money on a decentralized service. Rest is history.
Facebook is trying with Threads. Threads is directly targeting Fedi. Thankfully, it does not seem to be working the way Meta wanted it to work – that is, to start sucking people in from fedi due to sheer size and presumably better UI. Turns out people who had moved to fedi really hate Meta, who'da thunk it.
Blocking a somewhat fluctuating list of 25k+ instances is still considerably harder than blocking a pretty stable infrastructure of a single major social media platform.
I still think that fedi will help, and in fact I am pretty sure it is helping already, simply because it is quite decentralized. Blocking 20k+ instances is not trivial. And each of these instances is an entrypoint, so to speak, into the broader fedi. Missing even one is thus a big deal. If my instance is blocked, I can set up an account on a different one, follow the same people, and I am back in business.
At the same time all these instances are run independently. One can't simply threaten the whole fedi to force it to do a thing (say, take down an account), this just does not make sense.
Compare and contrast with centralized services like Facebook, gatekeepers like Cloudflare, and so on. Threatening one big entity with problems might be enough to "convince it" to take a thing down.
The reason governments and other powerful entities are able to control the information flow is because there are these hugely important single points of failure. Fedi is not perfect (mastodon.social is way too big for its own good…), but it is a step in the right direction.
Thank you!