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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

But this is where the disillusionment of this idol continues:

Do you think kids wouldn't develop the same mental health issues if they were on Mastodon instead of Facebook?

Do you think the largest Mastodon instances wouldn't start also harming their users once large enough?

There's nothing preventing the decentralized from becoming centralized over time, from the same network effects, and abusing the users all over again.

In which case, why fight for it? It's pointless; we started decentralized and became centralized; a re-decentralization moment just causes the same economic forces to pull everything together again.

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>> In which case, why fight for it? It's pointless.

I fought for years and came to the same conclusion. I just focus on myself now and a few tight knit circles of friends. We still hang out together on Diaspora. We still muck and hack around with stuff like Ubuntu Touch and debate the latest Linux distros and see how long we can go without our smartphones.

A few of my friends have gone "analog" because of what's happened. They were there during the first dot com bust. They've seen what the internet and tech have become - they just want to opt out now. Kind of crazy the times we're living in. Decentralization was the dream - now its just a nightmare a lot of us no longer what to be apart of.

> In which case, why fight for it?

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Among other things left unsaid.

> Do you think kids wouldn't develop the same mental health issues if they were on Mastodon instead of Facebook?

I'm not sure, but Facebook has employed too many PhDs to name with the goal of fostering addiction to their product, as well as behavioral ad targeting, and to my knowledge, Mastadon has not.

> Do you think the largest Mastodon instances wouldn't start also harming their users once large enough?

I don't think user harm is correlated with size of the platform.

> There's nothing preventing the decentralized from becoming centralized over time, from the same network effects, and abusing the users all over again.

Which is why I support things like the AT Protocol, which enable decentralized social networks that can share data amongst each other, and permit users greater control over what they see and from where.

> In which case, why fight for it?

Because I've been fighting for a better internet for decades at this point and see nothing better to do with that time were I to stop.

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