Thinking about how TWO devices that I own are “obsolete"—not because the hardware has kicked the bucket—but because Google simply doesn’t want to provide security updates for them.
And now that I think about it, it’s all so wasteful.
Here’s a strange thought for you. I own a Sony Walkman that was made decades ago. It still plays NEW cassettes sold on Bandcamp. The device is probably ~30-years-old.
None of these Android phones will be usable in 30 years.
It's entirely possible that many people from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp will find their way to the Fediverse -- especially if a MAGA takeover goes into full swing!
It's not that people aren't sticking around Mastodon.
There's more active users now than there were in September. Back then, there were only ~50,000 active users per month on mastodon.social.
It's that a certain segment of registrations were done either in protest, or as a Plan "B" if the Plan "A" (Twitter continues to be a going concern) fails.
That said, if Mastodon is seen merely as a Twitter alternative it will fail.
BIG NEWS: Pawoo.net, the world's 2nd biggest Mastodon instance, has just been acquired.
The entity acquiring them is the Mask Group, a business that also runs mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud. They are also active in the so-called "Web 3.0" space.
If you haven't heard of pawoo.net, it's because many instances have de-federated from it.
5/ If you want to know what this older version of the web looked like, and how it was explicitly social, I recommend browsing through Neocities.
Sites like these were why people literally just surfed the web as a hobby -- because there was so much social creativity going on that it could entertain you for days, weeks, months -- even years.
8/ Now I'm not the biggest booster of the web. In fact, I've long since said that the Internet needs to decentralize away from it.
Nevertheless, the web is a tool -- an important tool -- and we'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that basic HTML (with hyperlinking) can do a whole lot of things that can address inequality on the Internet.
If you're an activist and you worry about censorship from Meta and Facebook, building your own website and self-hosting it is an incredible tool.
10/ That said, we should never look at the web as the only tool for re-building the public square.
The Internet is bigger than the web.
To work for a more equitable, fair Internet, we need to build for:
The Web
Email
Chat (IRC, XMPP, The Matrix, etc.)
Social Media
File sharing
We can't let our foot off the gas pedal because certain powers-that-be are trying to do their damnedest to make us forget that the Internet was designed to be decentralized.