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Top-level
 @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. 20 comments
@LouisIngenthron And lawyers were not involved? No higher ups signed off?  @atomicpoet What do either of those things have to do with your attempt to establish a relationship between the server and the company? @LouisIngenthron That’s my point. A lawyer probably signed off, and someone with authority gave it a stamp of approval. @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? @LouisIngenthron Does a Microsoft employee own Twitter? Is Twitter a Microsoft product? @atomicpoet Which has what exactly to do with lawyers signing off on the account? You're bouncing all over the place here. @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. @atomicpoet If you want to continue this conversation, try replying to what I actually wrote instead of this nonsense argument you imagined me saying. @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 👋 @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?  @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. @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 @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. @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. @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. @timelordiroh in my hypothetical, this interoperability is not desired by the hypothetical entity running the instance. @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. @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 @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. |
Gregory's Server
@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.