Any communications platform that allows a many to one interaction, with the ability to obscure the source (you), is a danger to democracy.
By raising the noise floor, or manipulating sentiment in a inconsistent way, in such platforms, you can manipulate on a grand scale individual perception by distorting reflected appraisal. Its a fundamentally harmful and destructive process.
You do also however need anonymity at the same time, and there must be cost. Competing interests guarantee that this will never be possible in a centralized system. The feedback relationship which is distorted, and distorts itself, will run off the rails.
Human moderation doesn't scale, and AI moderation can't determine unique meaning, and hallucinates, distorting reflected appraisal in the process, isolating (through punishment), and removes agency.
We need to appropriately secure our communication platforms from these subtle but corrupting outcomes that are brittle and lack resiliency measures.
Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
I used to run a non-Mastodon Activity Pub server and it never really worked. There’s a reason why everyone just uses Mastodon, at which point who cares if there’s an open protocol.
Activity Pub itself is... a bit boring? And maybe that's a good thing? I tried implementing it though, and it's very unsurprising to me that a) Mastodon is the only game in town, b) why they use custom extensions and semantics, and c) why none of the other interesting content types are being used in any substantial way.
I think Mastodon/ActivityPub is a local maximum based on a 2010-2015 understanding of what social networks are/need, and that ATProto and Bluesky represents a realistic 2025 era understanding of the social web, with plenty of scope for advancement and staying current in a way that I doubt Mastodon can ever do.