I’ve been enjoying Mastodon so far, but I agree with this article’s warnings:
I think the solution needs to be some sort of mixed mode, subscription-based, not-for-profit semi-centralization.
Yes - that’s a mouthful, but imagine wiki-pedia-like foundation with centralized servers that offers some form of feature enhancements for subscribed users that would get enough of them to pay in order to pay the bills.
An approach like this could solve many of the issues from the article, but the leaders at Mastadon seem reluctant to do it.
I’d like to think BlueSky would head down this path… but it’s tough to trust the founder/source of BlueSky to do anything beyond a profit motive.
