GooglePlustodon: Mozilla Mastodon Instance Redirects To Google
Many people cite companies like Google as "leftists", but they're as right wing as it gets. Raving capitalists, deeply elitist, tax-dodgers, anti-union... And if they're not exploiting the working class or telling them to work for free, they're putting them out of business altogether... They passionately HATE the modern day hippie culture that prevails in the Fediverse. They don't want to "join in" with that culture. They want to destroy it. But the route to the latter is via the former, so...
If ever you doubted that Mozilla's forthcoming Mastodon instance will be the designated flagship for "GooglePlustodon", you might like to pop along to mozilla.social and see whose login you currently find staring you in the face. Better be quick though. Google's involvement will likely be much less blatant by the time of launch. But as of 5th January 2023, Mozilla Social's home URL redirects to accounts.google.com, revealing the obvious suspect behind Mozilla's Mastodon venture, as predicted.
BACKGROUND
Despite being majority funded by Google, Mozilla claims to be fiercely independent. So let's, for a moment, take that at face value...
Why, at any stage, would a fiercely independent business, using a software product with its own native login system, be messing about with a totally unnecessary third-party login at all - let alone a Google login?
The answer is, it wouldn't. Which means Mozilla Social is not Mozilla's instance. It's Google's.
We already knew that Mozilla had no reason to set up a Mastodon instance, or the remotest interest in doing so. And we already knew that Google was double-desperate to infiltrate a network that has, since November 2022, been a dire threat to its ecosystem.
With Google under existing threat from social discovery and frictionless query/response systems, it cannot afford to see online advertising hit by an explosion in community-funded, community-controlled no-ads networks.
They've always dreaded the Fediverse taking off, because it isn't theirs, it doesn't accommodate their strategies or business models, they haven't yet found a way to exploit it, and barely anyone in it is interested in their shitty spyware.
True, the Fediverse is not a direct competitor to Google's individual products. But its concept of redistributing the Internet from a single ecosystem owned and controlled by a Silicon-Valley coalition, back down into small fragments with community ownership, is powerfully threatening to monopolists. And it threatens them in numerous ways:
- It kills their anti-competitive self-preferencing ring.
- It steadily reduces the proportion of the Web they can exploit for advertising.
- It exposes the public to other escape routes from Big Tech's stranglehold, potentially causing a compound and increasingly viral shift away from Silicon Valley reliance.
- With control allowed to fully fragment to the point that the early Web was fragmented, the landscape becomes impractical to censor for reputation-management. Impractical to harness or manipulate for propaganda. Impractical to sockpile or botpile. Impractical to co-opt. Impractical as an acquisition target. The more you fragment the control, the harder life gets for monopolists.
Incidentally, the difference between post-Big-Tech fragmentation and early Web fragmentation would be public awareness. In the 1990s, the public had no reason to distrust Silicon Valley corporations. Today they have every reason. It's fair to conclude that if the Web really did significantly re-fragment, there would be virtually nothing Silicon Valley could do to reassert its monopoly.
Google knows that whilst Mastodon as a piece of software is not currently a threat to Big Tech, its increasing adoption could prompt a viral migration towards distributed control. If not managed, that threat would almost certainly destroy Google - by far the most vulnerable cybertech giant to distributed ecosystems. We should not forget that whilst Google has control of much Web infrastructure and accessware, its revenue primarily comes from advertising. If it can't advertise, it can't survive.
The monopolists always hoped that the Fediverse would prove too inconvenient and complicated for the masses. I'm sure they believed that. I believed it. But after Elon Musk began driving Twitter users to seek alternatives in high volume, it became clear that the Fediverse was accessible to a much broader group than experts had anticipated. In November 2022 we saw that non-technically-minded people could and would use the Fediverse. That will have sounded a shrill alarm at Google HQ.
When all the Google shills suddenly decide they totes just lurve the very same thing, at the very same time, you know the puppetmaster is pulling the strings.
Of particular concern would have been the fact that the new adoption of Mastodon predominantly comprised the political left. The political left is critically precious to advertising companies.
Many people cite companies like Google as "leftists", but in truth they're as right wing as it gets. Raving capitalists, deeply elitist, tax-dodgers, anti-union... And if they're not exploiting the working class or telling them to work for free, they're putting them out of business altogether. No one with billions of dollars in the bank is a "leftist".
But as advertising brokers, these companies are forced to feign a left wing stance because:
1. Left wing traits align perfectly with brand virtue-signalling, whilst right wing traits frequently prove toxic for brand image. Advertisers are thus reassured by left wing rhetoric and superficial left wing behaviour from advertising brokers.
2. The majority of the entertainment and creative business has left wing views, as does the mainstream media. Getting on the wrong side of these groups could be catastrophic for anyone who relies on creative work to drive ads, and on mainstream media to avoid bad publicity.
3. Advertising brokers are brands themselves, and revealing themselves as heavily right wing would likely prove directly toxic for their own brand image.
So Google's reaction when a left wing social network starts to gain traction is very different from its reaction when a right wing social network starts to gain traction. Even though Google is itself right wing, it knows that the route to mainstream acceptance and creative value is via the left. It would also be logical to assume that Google morbidly fears the left being exposed to a hardcore anti-capitalist mentality - such as that which was ingrained into Mastodon before the Twitter migration began. It's not hard to see why Mastodon suddenly came to matter to Google in November and December 2022.
Be in no doubt. Mozilla Social is Google in a face mask. Not that any current visitor would be in doubt, given the site's redirection to accounts.google.com.
WHEELS IN MOTION
But that almost comical redirect is far from the only clue that Big Tech, or specifically Google, are now breathlessly trying to infiltrate the Fediverse. Here are the highlights so far:
A substantial number of high-capacity, "general purpose" Mastodon instances opened after Elon Musk got involved with Twitter.
These instances often fail a basic reality check. Run by for-profit companies, no revenue, no niche (i.e. opened to maximise userbase-share rather than serve a passion), no apparent budget limitations, no apparent promotional gain.
The servers don't show demonstrable links to Google or other Big Tech brands, but it would be extremely naive to imagine that none of them were being financed and controlled by monopolists. Why would, say, a commercial hosting company that rigorously charges for its services, suddenly decide to host tens of thousands of social media accounts (and growing) for free, and at a loss? The most logical assumption is that someone IS paying. Why Big Tech? Well, to paraphrase an old Dan Egerstad chestnut from the 2000s:
"Who else would pay for this and be anonymous?"
The Google-bankrolled stooge Internet Archive set up a private Mastodon server and turned up in the Mastodon donors list in November.
Internet Archive had actually played down Mastodon before it began to gain serious traction as a Twitter alternative. The IA held a live event to discuss the decentralisation of social media shortly after Jack Dorsey mooted the decentralisation of Twitter about three years ago. Like Dorsey, IA's Silicon Valley event barely recognised the existence of the Fediverse.
Then, in 2021, IA were busy cheerleading Web3 social on Twitter when Mastodon was suggested in a reply. At that point, IA said Mastodon was "not truly decentralized", and suggested alternatives - not all of which were even half built. Seems there's been a considerable U-turn since October.
Again in November, Google mouthpiece the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published an article full of Google's characteristic interference in tech projects it doesn't yet control.
The article mentioned integrating advertising as a funding model, and unifying Mastodon's moderation principles based on those recommended by Big Tech. The EFF had not alluded to Mastodon before it began to gain serious traction as a Twitter alternative, and indeed had ignored everyone who asked on Twitter if the org had a Mastodon account.
Mozilla - another nonprofitalist on Google's life support machine - announced in December that they would open a public Mastodon instance.
The server URL is already redirecting to Google. Mozilla did have a disused Mastodon account, opened in 2017, but had deleted their posts, had not publicised the account externally, were supporting other decentralised options, and had ignored all public messages about Mastodon on Twitter.
Other, less obvious Google shills were also seen long-form chanting for Mastodon in the final two months of 2022.
When all the Google shills suddenly decide they totes just lurve the very same thing, at the very same time, you know the puppetmaster is pulling the strings.
INTO BATTLE
Mastodon and the Fediverse now face a fight for both independence and growth.
As I write, far right groups are aggressively pushing a blanket smear campaign against the whole of Mastodon. If campaigns of this type are allowed to continue, they will hamper the growth of the Fediverse - which would suit Big Tech perfectly.
Silicon Valley's vision of decentralisation is one in which they can much more easily infiltrate and extract value/profit from the system, and ideally, one in which they control the protocol. Well, I say "ideally"... Ideally, they don't want decentralisation at all. But it's become a thing, so their natural consolation resort is to at least get their hands on the steering wheel.
They've always dreaded the Fediverse taking off, because it isn't theirs, it doesn't accommodate their strategies or business models, they haven't yet found a way to exploit it, and barely anyone in it is interested in their shitty spyware. Above all, it's an exemplar of a sentiment they pray will never go mainstream.
To date, Mastodon has pushed that sentiment closer to the mainstream than it's ever been before. And that's why there currently exists a pre-launch Mastodon instance that, laughable as it may be, wants you to log into Google.