Interesting stuff. Fire your headline writer, though, because I think your conclusion is potentially more hopeful than the headline suggests.

I'm thinking of the bullet point about a "paid Mastodon instance." I think people (e.g. [1]) have been trying to imagine something like that into existence, and now a lot of groundwork has been laid. Now it's time to build on that, which isn't so much a technical as an institutional problem. As a recent piece on federated systems from Open Democracy also stated [2], what is needed now are people with "institutional expertise" to build up the organizational side of this. Some are suggesting that the Apache Foundation or the Free Software Foundation may provide a model [3].

1: http://ioo.coop/

2: https://www.opendemocracy.net/open2017/jimmy-tidey/what-woul...

3: https://mastodon.social/users/cyrinsong/updates/1606817

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PS: More organizational efforts: https://medium.com/@jonleibowitz/the-true-value-to-be-create...

I've been working on the 'identity problem' for several years with the hubzilla project. We took a different approach and made identity 'nomadic' which means that if you're "Fred Flintstone" your identity isn't tied to foo@bar.com but could pop up as bob@pop.com and your friends wouldn't know or care. In the application you're Fred Flintstone, period. Our members tend to migrate to different sites all the time - keeping their friends and content and profiles and settings intact. These can be cloned to various places where you wish to maintain your identity, or you can load everything from a thumb drive if you get kicked off one site for bad behaviour. If your home site goes dead for an hour, no problem. Post from another. Again - your friends and your content remain intact. Your profile and online identity are exactly the same. The only thing that changed is what computer you use - which we don't really care about and neither should you. And that's how it should be.

Hey there, I’m Matt Lee — founder of both GNU FM and one of the co-founders of GNU social.

It’s been an interesting few days for us.

GNU FM just turned 8, and I wrote a little post about that.

https://medium.com/@mattl/libre-fm-turns-8-stats-a-call-for-...

Your history of GNU social is a little off — GNU social didn’t fork from GNU FM, it was intentional on my part. GNU FM was built to support the Libre.fm site I was building, and I intended from day one for others to build and host their own GNU FM servers. Some people did, but most people did not and so I wanted to exercise some caution when adding social networking type features to GNU FM. I really didn’t want Libre.fm to be a social networking site.

So working with my two colleagues at the FSF, Deb Nicholson and Donald Robertson, and later our intern Steven DuBois we built some prototypes of an early project called GNU Social (capital S) and demoed them at Software Freedom Day in 2010.

Later, we had some ideas to write a series of plugins for Evan Prodromou’s StatusNet project that would extend it to do some of the things we were thinking of for our new GNU social (lowercase S) project, and worked with a local (to Boston) StatusNet developer, Craig Andrews and a couple of interns at the FSF — Ian Denhardt and Sean Corbett to get this started. Craig had already developed a lot of code for StatusNet itself and chose to donate this to the FSF for the GNU social project.

So for a while, GNU social and StatusNet were two projects with a mostly shared codebase, and eventually we all merged with Free&Social into GNU social as it today.

I didn’t think of GNU social as a brand, but as a framework that could be used to build lots of social networks. Rob Myers and I tried to build a network from GNU social called Daisychain. It didn’t work out.

I still think like that, and I’m glad to see Mastodon embrace compatibility with GNU social users as I think it’s still the largest federated social network project out there in terms of active users, but it’s hard to measure such things.

I don’t do much day to day with GNU social now, but I remain committed to free software social networking. I have a fun idea for how to really demonstrate federation in July when my first movie, Orang-U: An Ape Goes To College is released.

It’s all made with free software, we’re releasing all the footage and editing files so people can remix and make their own movies.

And if who really need a centered identities run his own mastodon inside it's domain? It could be shown in federated with it's unique address: @me@mydomain.com and would be no worries. He would only loose it's name if loosing its domain. Unpractical for most mortals but accessible for medium to large organizations and brands.

Another point would be have databases simpler as sqlite, the way the server could be ran inside raspberry pi's and even smartphones. It would be trully federated and trully personal, absolutely open. People can message me only when I'm online...

Ello, Mastodon.