Mastodon recently incorporated into a nonprofit to continue development. What I don’t understand is how can you truly say an app is decentralized when at any time an instance owner can be kicked by the powers that be from the federation. You work really hard to build up an instance then it is just pulled from the federation white list. Also, what incentives do instance owners have? Besides a rich boi server hoster for giggles what incentive to hosting your own network is there? You receive no sales, no ad revenue, no rights to use the brand for merchandise (Mastodon has seized brand sales). How can you expect a truly centralized network to grow when the weight of the network is decided by local network owners who have no financial income to sustain or grow large instances.

I think everyone including here on lemmy realizes that the only way these instances succeed is if you find out who the real power brokers that run the servers are. You can’t just fund these $2,000 a month server bills on large instances without having a hedge fund behind you. I’ll just be honest if a hedge fund is behind something it probably isn’t good. In this thread we take a deep dive into Mastodon and Lemmy’s instance owners.