Flick by Nikunj Gupta

So almost a year ago (a year?!?), I made a post talking about the virtues of forking Mastodon in an effort to create an option for people who currently use the Mastodon platform to have different experience that is not tied to the singular vision of it's creator.

In the time between that post and now, I've gone on a journey of discovery seeing what else the fedi had to offer, had the fortune to talk to many smart people and gained insights from continuing work on both Fipamo and The Bad Space. Many of the issues I brought up in the previous Community piece are still present, but my thoughts on a solution has changed.

That solution no longer includes forking the Mastodon codebase. To be quite honest, I feel the fedi would be better served to exploring new options than attempting to retrofit an aging codebase that resists positive change.

This is not to say I believe people who are using Mastodon right now should be abandoned. I still strongly feel that those people should not be left to the wayside as we dive deep into what other ideas can offer. However, the way forward is not to create another platform based on another platform that has been at odds with true independence and data portability.

I talked about the merits of Mastodon as an early adopter of the Activity Pub protocol but it still skirts too closely to the dark patterns and methodologies of centralized platforms like having no positions to address the ongoing lack of quality moderation tools or a resource to address the ever present accessibility and UI issues that persist for the project. These glaring omissions including the inability for a person to retrieve their entire dataset if they are not moving to another Mastodon platform gives the impression the project wants to emulate centralized platforms as opposed to being an 'ethical alternative.' This point is driven further home when the Mastodon project gets advice from people who pioneered many of these unscrupulous techniques.

It is time to not only leave Mastodon behind, but also the relentless pursuit of trying to recreate platforms that simply do not serve the public good and make digital spaces less safe.

Fortunately, there are projects that have reached this conclusion before I did.

One that stands out is the slurp project that attempts to make data portability a reality by allowing movement from one Activity Pub enabled project to another and not just Mastodon to Mastodon. Admittedly, it's not the easiest tool to use just yet, but it gives a proof of concept of what's possible when we think outside the dark patterns of centralized platforms and embrace the freedom that independent social media can provide.

Another promising project is the BlackSky Algorithms Project built on the AT Protocol that looks to break away from the the confines of Bluesky, another platform that seeks to emulate the dark patterns of centralizes social media, to provide another alternative for people that want spaces that center self-determination, data independence and flexibility for the community to define their own rules outside the corporate mantras that are forced upon us.

One thing that I do like about this current conversation about social media is that we are questioning our ideas around what it can be. Those ideas have been shaped by corporate entities for the last two decades that have unfortunately seeped into projects that claim to want to be different from those purposes.

But a big plus that comes with recognizing these patterns and how they get repeated is gaining the ability to see where they fail and how we, collectively, can make different decisions about where we are spending our online time and the platforms we support. In this context, we have a treasure trove of information that shows us what works and what doesn't.

Because the future isn't choosing one platform over another. The future is being able to go wherever you want because you have the ability to move freely no matter where you are without having to start over again because of the draconian data policies of corporate and non-profits that resemble corporate spaces.

Projects that let us do that are the ones I want to build and support, because I don't want to try and fix broken ideas.

I want us to focus on ones that want us to get free.

-r.