Recently there was a big dump of articles on Mastodon, a micro blogging platform across several different media outlets internationally.
archive.fo
archive.fo
archive.fo
archive.fo
archive.fo
archive.fo
forbes.com
Mastodon is being pushed as an alternative to Twitter free from its problematic users. The issue is that Mastodon isn’t new, it’s built to the specifications of the GNUsocial API, and there’s already a preexisting community of aforementioned problematic users.
Essentially, Mastodon seems to be an attempt at “embrace, extend, and extinguish” in the GNUsocial community, and has regularly broken compatibility with the rest of the network while misinforming others about the nature of the GNUsocial Federation. Most if not all articles do not mention GNUsocial, let alone StatusNet that came before it. And Mastodon has done all of this while blocking access to several instances internally and locking them out of the emerging discussions on and around their own network.
This all seems to point towards a willful intent by Mastodon to break the decentralization of the network, or at least exploit the federation for its own ends. The instance is now at 100k users and growing fast, with no sign of slowing. And if Mastodon succeeds, it defeats the purpose of the GNUsocial network as a bastion of free speech, not subject to the echo chamber mentality or design of other social networks.
Join a GNUsocial instance if you haven't already. Several instances still exist that federate unconditionally, respect user freedoms, and do not ban for petty political reasons. These include, but are not limited to:
freezepeach.xyz
gs.smuglo.li
sealion.club
shitposter.club
unsafe.space
Collectively, these instances form the backbone of the GNUsocial "Axis", and the Mastodon-aligned instances that of GNUsocial "Comintern".
Other communities can be found at fediverse.org
If you're already on a GNUsocial instance, or just joined, participate in the network normally. If you want to discuss the organized opposition to Mastodon, that can be tagged using #Axis in your post.
An XMPP multi-user chat for the administrators and users of instances aligned against Mastodon can be found at [email protected]/* */
If you wish to host your own GNUsocial instance, check out postActiv: postactiv.com