High Archmage of Qoto @higharchmage@social.cleverlibre.org

Mt Fuji reflecting in Lake Tanuki, Fujinomiya Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan

Photo:宮崎泰一

#JoinIn

A warning: there's going to be a concerted effort to re-centralize the Fediverse.

As we've just seen with the acquisition of pawoo.net, that's already happening.

What are you going to do to thwart this trend?

There's going to be a massive land grab of all these big instances. There will be lots of merging and and acquiring too.

My advice is that you all become *very* aware of who owns your instance and why.

Get to know your admins—make sure their values align with your own.

If you don't want to put your social media life in the hands of strangers, then self-host your own instance.

Like it or not, it should no longer be assumed that "volunteers" are running your instances.

The Mask Group, which now runs three large instances "has raised over US$50 million from private and institutional backers"—their words not mine.

BIG NEWS: Pawoo.net, the world's 2nd biggest Mastodon instance, has just been acquired.

The entity acquiring them is the Mask Group, an entity that also runs mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud. They are also active in the so-called "Web 3.0" space.

If you haven't heard of pawoo.net, it's because many instances have de-federated from it.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mask-network-acquires-pawoo-net-070000858.html

Everyone needs to be aware that Mask Group trades a crypto token.

This same entity now owns pawoo.net, mstdn.jo, and mastodon.cloud.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/12/21/encrypted-messaging-protocol-mask-network-acquires-mastodon-server-pawoonet/

The TL;DR of the Twitter files is this:
Certain foreign governments have been known to engage in hacking to obtain dirt on politicians, which they then leak around election time to influence voters (remember the DNC leaks? That was Russian Intelligence). Social media platforms are aware of this, and are actively working to try and limit foreign intelligence agencies ability to influences the public via these 'hack-and-leak' operations.

Several US government agencies track this from the intelligence side (monitoring the people doing the hacking and leaking). It makes sense for the government to give a heads up to social media platforms about potential upcoming influence operations so the platforms can get ahead of it. In the case of Hunter Biden's Laptop, this is what they did. The heads up resulted in several platforms basically deciding to flat out block links to the story altogether. US politicians on the side who would have benefitted from these leaks tried to frame it as government censorship (The FBI simply gave a heads up to social media platforms, but didn't state how the story should be dealt with, as that would be a clear cut violation of the first amendment).

The Twitter files is just data pertaining to the legal process from the FBI working with companies to notify them of influence ops. None of the released files suggest any censorship, and it's mostly just really boring internal politics. But, the current Twitter CEO knows that people on Twitter only read headlines, so by adding their own commentary to the releases, they can spin it in such a way that people will believe there's some big conspiracy afoot.

Any study of #JohnMastodon must include parallel study of Mark, Matthew, and Luke Mastodon.

You may notice that tracking is more sporadic. This is because ADS-B is ground-based, over the water we rely on ADS-C and ACARS, which is satellite-based. An example below is from one of the hobbyists that feed satellite signals to ADSBExchange. The one in the back has been picking up signals for the current flight, this is a California-based ground station. In about 2 hours we will be picking up a signal from the UK one.