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Louis Ingenthron

@atomicpoet @dotnet @fediversenews What does the account being created months ago have to do with whether or not they're affiliated? I don't see where you're making that leap. It makes sense they'd want to claim the name they'd eventually use early, even if they weren't prepared to commit to engaging yet. That doesn't mean they're affiliated with the server.

And that's on top of the fact that they've now expressly said they are not affiliated with it. 🤦‍♂️

31 comments
Chris Trottier

@LouisIngenthron @dotnet @fediversenews Well, I don’t believe them.

You don’t think Microsoft’s lawyers will send a cease and desist if their intellectual property weren’t violated?

You think Microsoft would park their official account there for 5 months if there weren’t some sort of relationship?

The reason it’s probably not “official” is because Microsoft likely doesn’t want blowback.

Louis Ingenthron

@atomicpoet Microsoft's developer network is extremely community-focused. This is absolutely inline with their past actions. There are hundreds of software packages available that use the .NET name as part of their branding, and Microsoft's lawyers have a history of going after none of them. Moreover, running an account instead of a server is the exact same way their marketing department works on every other social media, so why complicate things here unnecessarily?

Also, "blowback" from who or what?

I really think you're grasping at straws here.

@atomicpoet Microsoft's developer network is extremely community-focused. This is absolutely inline with their past actions. There are hundreds of software packages available that use the .NET name as part of their branding, and Microsoft's lawyers have a history of going after none of them. Moreover, running an account instead of a server is the exact same way their marketing department works on every other social media, so why complicate things here unnecessarily?

Chris Trottier

@LouisIngenthron Surely you’re not unaware of how much of the Fediverse community views Microsoft, right?

Louis Ingenthron

@atomicpoet Not all of it apparently. I regularly interact with developers on here and haven't heard a hint of anti-Microsoft sentiment.

There are plenty of us .NET developers on Mastodon.

And anyone who hates Microsoft is free to defederate from dotnet.social.

Chris Trottier

@LouisIngenthron Maybe not all, but if I were Microsoft, I’d be worried about Fediblock.

Louis Ingenthron

@atomicpoet Mostly because Fediblock is an easily-manipulated relic that needs to go the way of the dinosaurs. Mastodon has outgrown it.

Chris Trottier replied to Louis

@LouisIngenthron I mean, that’s what someone from QOTO would say.

But marketers, especially of big companies, tend to be very paranoid of blowback and exercise caution.

I’m not saying that Microsoft owns dotnet.social.

But non-affiliation? I don’t buy that.

And clearly whoever owns dotnet.social works in lockstep with Microsoft’s marketing department—otherwise they wouldn’t put the account on that server.

Louis Ingenthron replied to Chris

@atomicpoet Or their marketing department tried to create an instance, saw how difficult it is to run on Windows, gave up, found a community instance already dedicated to their product run by an employee, reached out to him, and he was happy to have them, because of course he was if he was such a big fan that he started an instance dedicated to their product in the first place.

That's not only Occam's Razor here, but it's consistent with the story they've given.

And the unnecessary dig against my server isn't strengthening your argument; to the contrary.

@atomicpoet Or their marketing department tried to create an instance, saw how difficult it is to run on Windows, gave up, found a community instance already dedicated to their product run by an employee, reached out to him, and he was happy to have them, because of course he was if he was such a big fan that he started an instance dedicated to their product in the first place.

Chris Trottier replied to Louis

@LouisIngenthron And lawyers were not involved? No higher ups signed off?

Louis Ingenthron replied to Chris

@atomicpoet What do either of those things have to do with your attempt to establish a relationship between the server and the company?

Chris Trottier replied to Louis

@LouisIngenthron That’s my point. A lawyer probably signed off, and someone with authority gave it a stamp of approval.

Louis Ingenthron replied to Chris

@atomicpoet *What* is your point?

Lawyers probably signed off on creating Twitter accounts (because Twitter actually has an EULA, unlike dotnet.social). Does that mean that Microsoft is in cahoots with Twitter too?

Chris Trottier replied to Louis

@LouisIngenthron Does a Microsoft employee own Twitter? Is Twitter a Microsoft product?

Louis Ingenthron replied to Chris

@atomicpoet Which has what exactly to do with lawyers signing off on the account? You're bouncing all over the place here.

Chris Trottier replied to Louis

@LouisIngenthron If you believe a $1T just improvises its social media presence—and doesn’t get a lawyer to sign off on something that establishes ground rules with the host—I don’t know what to tell you.

Louis Ingenthron replied to Chris

@atomicpoet If you want to continue this conversation, try replying to what I actually wrote instead of this nonsense argument you imagined me saying.

Chris Trottier replied to Louis

@LouisIngenthron I don’t think there’s much more to talk about, and this insistence that Microsoft just happened to arrive at dotnet.social is odd.

Have a great night 👋

Jonathan Gerhardson replied to Chris

@atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron I'm not a developer nor super familiar with how feature updates to Mastodon happen. Is it possible for one instance to offer some feature not available on another? For the sake of an easy analogy let's say the panting dog Snapchat filter is only available on one instance. Everyone loves it, people on other servers envy it and so migrate. Embrace extend extinguish. Would this technically be feasible, or is there something built into Masto/activitypub as a safeguard?

✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh :she_her:🇵🇸 replied to Jonathan

@highvizghilliesuit @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron it's entirely possible to use different software and add features, just on mastodon there's hometown and glitch-soc forks that add features (some I really like and miss). There's also many other apps like calckey and friendica that have entirely different feature sets. However, if Microsoft were to make a fork of mastodon, they have to make it Open source and I believe also gpl compliant.

✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh :she_her:🇵🇸 replied to ✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh

@highvizghilliesuit @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron however, if they're activitypub compliant, you'll still see the posts on mastodon and the features you have. There's already @pixelfed that could easily add those filters in the future

Jonathan Gerhardson replied to ✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh

@timelordiroh @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @pixelfed so likely if the userbase grows large enough, someone will at least attempt what I'm proposing, am I wrong? This is more like the difference between Signal or Whatsapp than Ethereum or Monero.

✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh :she_her:🇵🇸 replied to Jonathan

@highvizghilliesuit @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @pixelfed I would say it's already happened. Funkwhale allows you to listen to a shared library on the instance. Bookwyrm has book metadata. Calckey and some others have discord like post reactions. We all have our own feature sets, but can still talk a common language of activitypub. If you're on calckey, you could react to this mastodon post using an emote instead of replying to it.

✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh :she_her:🇵🇸 replied to ✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh

@highvizghilliesuit as long as this hypothetical app is compliant with activitypub, it can federate with mastodon, funkwhale, bookwyrm, calckey, pixelfed, gotosocial, bonfire, write.as, and many more apps that all have their own features.

Jonathan Gerhardson replied to ✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh

@timelordiroh in my hypothetical, this interoperability is not desired by the hypothetical entity running the instance.

Jonathan Gerhardson replied to ✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh

@timelordiroh @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @pixelfed I guess what I meant was could one dominant instance capture enough of the userbase to effectively centralize the whole kit and kaboodle, (yes that's the correct spelling). Further research needed on my end though, it looks like.

✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh :she_her:🇵🇸 replied to Jonathan

@highvizghilliesuit so they could be on their own and not be activitypub compliant, them they'd be just another social networking site and lose the distributed network effect of the fediverse. There's also other protocols like diaspora* & zot that most activitypub apps don't use. Could they update in the future to not federate, sure but that would lose the network effect of tying in to the fediverse. Could they have instance specific features? Sure, but popular ones will be copied

Jonathan Gerhardson replied to ✨🏳️‍⚧️Timelordiroh

@timelordiroh thank you, this is what I was trying to figure out. Is there any good idea lame assholes won't steal? Not that I've seen. Although I hope I'm being unduly cynical.

Samir Al-Battran

@LouisIngenthron @atomicpoet
Yes, I agree with Louis
Those who are anti-Microsoft haven't followed all the transformation MS went through in the last 10 years.
They now champion open source, and IMHO is the most developer friendly big corp out there.
Nobody comes close to their level of dev support and devrel, not Google, not Apple, let alone any of the big socials.

I just posted this few days ago
m.tweepsmap.com/@Samir/1099433

@LouisIngenthron @atomicpoet
Yes, I agree with Louis
Those who are anti-Microsoft haven't followed all the transformation MS went through in the last 10 years.
They now champion open source, and IMHO is the most developer friendly big corp out there.
Nobody comes close to their level of dev support and devrel, not Google, not Apple, let alone any of the big socials.

Jupiter Rowland
@Louis Ingenthron @Chris Trottier Look beyond your bubble of .NET devs who came over from the birbsite over the course of the last six months.

Look at those who have been here before the #TwitterMigration. Better yet, look at those who have been on #Friendica or #Hubzilla before Mastodon even existed. The Fediverse was much different back then.

People generally distrusted all of #GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). They used Linux whenever and wherever they possibly could. They avoided commercial, corporate-owned, proprietary, non-free, closed-source software like the plague.

Microsoft was actually considered the ultimate evil, also due to Steve Ballmer's attempted crusade of total annihilation against #FreeLibreOpenSourceSoftware, Linux first and foremost.

Devs coded in C, C++, PHP, Python etc., always either cross-platform and Linux-first or Linux-only, put their works under the GPL, the AGPL, the MIT license etc. and open-sourced them. They would never have touched C#, .NET or any other language that was owned by a big corporation and/or would have lead to Windows-only or Windows-first software with a 10-foot barge pole. And they never had to.

Some Fediverse projects actually moved their code repositories from GitHub to Framagit, Codeberg or another non-corporate, non-commercial Gitea-based hoster after Microsoft took over GitHub.
@Louis Ingenthron @Chris Trottier Look beyond your bubble of .NET devs who came over from the birbsite over the course of the last six months.

Look at those who have been here before the #TwitterMigration
Thomas Bolon

@atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @dotnet @fediversenews Regarding the account, it was taken as soon as I created the server by someone. I asked the user to release it in the following days, which he accepted, and I have blocked it since to prevent squatting. Microsoft just contacted me to ask if they could use it yesterday. Simple story really! 😅

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