Corporate/business ownership on it's own is not a deal breaker. There are many business mastodon instances: https://mastodonservers.net/servers/business

It's the combination that is a deal breaker. Corporate AND centralized. We've seen this movie before. It's a predictably boring story that ends with enshittification.

[–] ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 hours ago

well bluesky is not owned by a normal corporation, but i’d say the problem is it’s supposed to be decentralized, that’s it’s entire point and purpose….
so if it’s not, then that’s problematic….
it’s still fairly new so maybe they want everything perfect before they start federating?
the split between Ruby version 1.8 and 1.9 was huge and seriously hindered it’s growth….
i have hope for Bluesky and the AT protocol… but not a ton of hope.

[–] wuphysics87@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Agreeish? (M)any one of us can download wikipedia. Does that still make it centralized when it is designed to be distributed that easily? That design choice is baked into the ethos. Centralized vs. Decentralized seems not to be binary.

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

But once you download It, any changes you make are only local. You cannot edit wikipedia using a non-wikipedia account (sure you can edit anonymously but then your IP functions as your account) and the articles are not systematically stored in different wikipedia instances. There is one Wikipedia.

By the way, centralized doesn't mean "walled off".

[–] wuphysics87@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Once you download wikipedia, you can edit it and distribute. Other people with their own copies can merge your changes into theirs, or you can push your changes upstream. Even if they need to be signed to accepted. Doesn't that make Wikipedia more like the Linux Kernel and less like The Encyclopedia Britannica? Sure, for the kernel there is a "main and central" repo, but the whole point of git is that it isn't centralized. It's distributed.

In fact, in a loose way, wikipedia meets the criteria of Free Software. You can:

Read the source code
Modify the source code
Distribute the source code
Distribute your modifications to the source code

edit: wikipedia is predominately licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago

Sure but I don't think that makes it "decentralized" it makes it as you correctly point out, open source. Those are orthogonal categories.There aren't parts of wikipedia that are hosted in other wikipedia instances that talk to each other the same way mastodon does. There is a unique, central, Wikipedia.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

You can download all of bluesky easily through the firehose, and it is federated.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

Luckily, there's non-corporate bluesky servers that I can use instead of the main one.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I agree with your overall point, but Wikipedia has a singular mission. Social settings can have wildy different missions from shitposting, to hobbies, study groups, to support groups, etc. There is no singular moderation ethos that can apply to all of them, that's why decentralization is important in social media.

We want to algorithms to work for the people, not have people slaving for the algorithms.

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Of course I agree that decentralization for social media is hugely important. I'm just pointing out that there can exist use cases where centralization makes sense and/or is not a problem.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 1 day ago

Absolutely I was not trying to take away from your point! Cory Doctorow actually recently wrote a good piece on Wikipedia that you reminded me of.