I think that Musk buying twitter is mainly a problem for the liberals. Twitter had a fairly tightly controlled Overton window around liberal centre, and any big accounts that were outside that window got themselves banned. If Musk allows the Overton window to expand that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I also see some positive side effects already with people in the mainstream finally starting to discuss the problem of oligarchs owning major communication channels that people use. It seems people only start waking up to these things when an oligarch they don’t like buys a media platform.

Another positive side effect I expect is that we’ll see a new wave of migration to Mastodon. Each time a commercial platform does something to piss their user base off we see a nice bump in Mastodon subscriptions.

In my view the best plan of action would be to continue encouraging people to use the Fediverse and get it to a place where it starts being seen as a mainstream option. Ultimately, social media platforms should be publicly owned and non profit. This is precisely how the Fediverse works.

A loose network of sites run by individuals is also how the internet was envisioned to work in the first place. We went off track with commercial social media platforms driving centralization, but now we have a chance to get back to the original visions.

One major reason for centralization was discoverability. It was more convenient to go to a single social media site where all the content was than to hunt for small blogs around the internet. Federation solves this problem by allowing sites to connect with one another and share content. This provides a user experience that’s comparable to centralized platforms without the need for everyone to use a single site.

To sum up, I think that we already have a fantastic solution available, and all we need to do is make it grow. One day the fediverse could become bigger than any single commercial platform, and at that point we’ll have wrestled the internet back from the corporate overlords.