Microsoft’s official @dotnet sent its first Mastodon post today.
Pay attention to the domain: dotnet.social.
Which means Microsoft is operating their own Mastodon community server.
@dotnet account was registered in November, but it became active today.
Clearly, Microsoft sees the Fediverse as core to marketing to developers. I wonder what other brands they’ll bring to the Fediverse as well.
Other people are noting that dotnet.social is not “officially” affiliated with Microsoft.
By why would Microsoft put the official @dotnet at dotnet.social if there’s no relationship?
Who are they trying to kid?
We see you, Microsoft 😉
@atomicpoet @dotnet @fediversenews Why would they not? They can migrate any time if they need to, but this makes it easier for their marketing crew. Most brand accounts are just accounts, not whole servers.
@LouisIngenthron @dotnet @fediversenews Look at when the account was created. Look at when the first message was sent.
Clearly, there’s been affiliation for a long time.
@atomicpoet @dotnet @fediversenews What does the account being created months ago have to do with whether or not they're affiliated? I don't see where you're making that leap. It makes sense they'd want to claim the name they'd eventually use early, even if they weren't prepared to commit to engaging yet. That doesn't mean they're affiliated with the server.
And that's on top of the fact that they've now expressly said they are not affiliated with it. 🤦♂️
@atomicpoet Microsoft's developer network is extremely community-focused. This is absolutely inline with their past actions. There are hundreds of software packages available that use the .NET name as part of their branding, and Microsoft's lawyers have a history of going after none of them. Moreover, running an account instead of a server is the exact same way their marketing department works on every other social media, so why complicate things here unnecessarily?
Also, "blowback" from who or what?
I really think you're grasping at straws here.
@LouisIngenthron Surely you’re not unaware of how much of the Fediverse community views Microsoft, right?
@atomicpoet Not all of it apparently. I regularly interact with developers on here and haven't heard a hint of anti-Microsoft sentiment.
There are plenty of us .NET developers on Mastodon.
And anyone who hates Microsoft is free to defederate from dotnet.social.
@LouisIngenthron Maybe not all, but if I were Microsoft, I’d be worried about Fediblock.
@atomicpoet Mostly because Fediblock is an easily-manipulated relic that needs to go the way of the dinosaurs. Mastodon has outgrown it.
@LouisIngenthron I mean, that’s what someone from QOTO would say.
But marketers, especially of big companies, tend to be very paranoid of blowback and exercise caution.
I’m not saying that Microsoft owns dotnet.social.
But non-affiliation? I don’t buy that.
And clearly whoever owns dotnet.social works in lockstep with Microsoft’s marketing department—otherwise they wouldn’t put the account on that server.
@atomicpoet Or their marketing department tried to create an instance, saw how difficult it is to run on Windows, gave up, found a community instance already dedicated to their product run by an employee, reached out to him, and he was happy to have them, because of course he was if he was such a big fan that he started an instance dedicated to their product in the first place.
That's not only Occam's Razor here, but it's consistent with the story they've given.
And the unnecessary dig against my server isn't strengthening your argument; to the contrary.
@LouisIngenthron And lawyers were not involved? No higher ups signed off?
@atomicpoet What do either of those things have to do with your attempt to establish a relationship between the server and the company?
@LouisIngenthron That’s my point. A lawyer probably signed off, and someone with authority gave it a stamp of approval.
@atomicpoet *What* is your point?
Lawyers probably signed off on creating Twitter accounts (because Twitter actually has an EULA, unlike dotnet.social). Does that mean that Microsoft is in cahoots with Twitter too?
@LouisIngenthron Does a Microsoft employee own Twitter? Is Twitter a Microsoft product?
@atomicpoet Which has what exactly to do with lawyers signing off on the account? You're bouncing all over the place here.
@LouisIngenthron If you believe a $1T just improvises its social media presence—and doesn’t get a lawyer to sign off on something that establishes ground rules with the host—I don’t know what to tell you.
@atomicpoet If you want to continue this conversation, try replying to what I actually wrote instead of this nonsense argument you imagined me saying.
@LouisIngenthron I don’t think there’s much more to talk about, and this insistence that Microsoft just happened to arrive at dotnet.social is odd.
Have a great night 👋
@atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron
"Microsoft just happened to arrive at dotnet.social"
Went through the same process as anyone - same process as me - had a look around at available servers, saw a "dotnet.social", "Hey, let's go there!".
The dotnet.social owner is not even an MS employee. And nor am I.
Can users of a particular software project not spin up a community server and federate on common interests without issue?
I was hoping that this new decentralised model would be less prone to brigading and suchlike icky behaviour. Oh well.
@atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron I'm not a developer nor super familiar with how feature updates to Mastodon happen. Is it possible for one instance to offer some feature not available on another? For the sake of an easy analogy let's say the panting dog Snapchat filter is only available on one instance. Everyone loves it, people on other servers envy it and so migrate. Embrace extend extinguish. Would this technically be feasible, or is there something built into Masto/activitypub as a safeguard?
🇵🇸
@highvizghilliesuit @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron it's entirely possible to use different software and add features, just on mastodon there's hometown and glitch-soc forks that add features (some I really like and miss). There's also many other apps like calckey and friendica that have entirely different feature sets. However, if Microsoft were to make a fork of mastodon, they have to make it Open source and I believe also gpl compliant.
@highvizghilliesuit @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron however, if they're activitypub compliant, you'll still see the posts on mastodon and the features you have. There's already @pixelfed that could easily add those filters in the future
@timelordiroh @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @pixelfed so likely if the userbase grows large enough, someone will at least attempt what I'm proposing, am I wrong? This is more like the difference between Signal or Whatsapp than Ethereum or Monero.
@highvizghilliesuit @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @pixelfed I would say it's already happened. Funkwhale allows you to listen to a shared library on the instance. Bookwyrm has book metadata. Calckey and some others have discord like post reactions. We all have our own feature sets, but can still talk a common language of activitypub. If you're on calckey, you could react to this mastodon post using an emote instead of replying to it.
@timelordiroh @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @pixelfed I guess what I meant was could one dominant instance capture enough of the userbase to effectively centralize the whole kit and kaboodle, (yes that's the correct spelling). Further research needed on my end though, it looks like.
@highvizghilliesuit @timelordiroh @atomicpoet @pixelfed You mean, could a company do to Mastodon what Google did to email?
Yes, it's possible. But private email servers/masto instances will still exist.
@LouisIngenthron @timelordiroh @atomicpoet @pixelfed I imagined it would happen maybe more like iMessage but yeah basically. Just thinking out loud about things I don't fully understand, as is the point of social media I believe.
@highvizghilliesuit @atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron
As long as it doesn’t break interoperability on the federation protocol level or the underlying data that is indeed possible.
That is also why Mastodon can talk with all the other amazing Fediverse services and instances.
Mastodon is open source. When you are hosting your own instance you can easily modify the behavior of your instance. For example not all instances have a character limit of 500.
@highvizghilliesuit Yes. For example, my server has Quote Tooting.
I'm not exactly sure what quote tooting is, but I do wish I could do markdown style block quotes.
@highvizghilliesuit It's the same as quote tweeting on Twitter, where you can embed another toot while adding your own commentary. It's like a combination of boosting and replying.
@LouisIngenthron Ah, I see. I am not a twitter refugee, so didn't follow. Last time I used it was to impersonate the Discovery Channel before they were on twitter. (I was a teenager.)
@LouisIngenthron @atomicpoet
Yes, I agree with Louis
Those who are anti-Microsoft haven't followed all the transformation MS went through in the last 10 years.
They now champion open source, and IMHO is the most developer friendly big corp out there.
Nobody comes close to their level of dev support and devrel, not Google, not Apple, let alone any of the big socials.
I just posted this few days ago
https://m.tweepsmap.com/@Samir/109943380630571290
Look at those who have been here before the #TwitterMigration. Better yet, look at those who have been on #Friendica or #Hubzilla before Mastodon even existed. The Fediverse was much different back then.
People generally distrusted all of #GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). They used Linux whenever and wherever they possibly could. They avoided commercial, corporate-owned, proprietary, non-free, closed-source software like the plague.
Microsoft was actually considered the ultimate evil, also due to Steve Ballmer's attempted crusade of total annihilation against #FreeLibreOpenSourceSoftware, Linux first and foremost.
Devs coded in C, C++, PHP, Python etc., always either cross-platform and Linux-first or Linux-only, put their works under the GPL, the AGPL, the MIT license etc. and open-sourced them. They would never have touched C#, .NET or any other language that was owned by a big corporation and/or would have lead to Windows-only or Windows-first software with a 10-foot barge pole. And they never had to.
Some Fediverse projects actually moved their code repositories from GitHub to Framagit, Codeberg or another non-corporate, non-commercial Gitea-based hoster after Microsoft took over GitHub.
@jupiter_rowland Sure, but now every point you just made has been reversed.
There are lots of .NET developers on Masto now.
Microsoft has proved themselves to be much more developer friendly than any of those other examples.
Steve Ballmer's been out for almost a *decade* now.
C# and .NET are fully cross-compatible now.
GitHub is beloved by developers of all OSes and is a beacon of Microsoft's commitment to open source.
I agree Microsoft's not always been the good guy. But they've been doing the right thing for a good long while now, and they deserve the little bit of trust that's bought them.
@jupiter_rowland This is cool history, but I take offense to the bubble of dotnet devs, as I identify as a dotnet dev and don't want to be relegated to second-class status because of this.
@atomicpoet @LouisIngenthron @dotnet @fediversenews Regarding the account, it was taken as soon as I created the server by someone. I asked the user to release it in the following days, which he accepted, and I have blocked it since to prevent squatting. Microsoft just contacted me to ask if they could use it yesterday. Simple story really! 😅
@styx31 @atomicpoet @dotnet Occam's Razor strikes again!
This is potentially very exciting.
Am I correct in understanding there is no provable/ definitive line from that account/domain to Microsoft?
@Burns I understand the admin acct has a verified link to an URI in Microsoft.com
@atomicpoet @louisingenthron@qoto.org @dotnet @fediversenews In the US intellectual property is protected primarily by trademarks, patents and copyrights. In this case, patents don’t apply. According to the on-line US Government Trademark database and Copyright database, the phrase “dotnet” is neither trademarked nor copyright by Microsoft. Not sure what Microsoft IP is being violated by having an instance named “dotnet.social”
@LouisIngenthron @dotnet @fediversenews Well, I don’t believe them.
You don’t think Microsoft’s lawyers will send a cease and desist if their intellectual property weren’t violated?
You think Microsoft wouldn’t park their official account there for 5 months if there weren’t some sort of relationship?
The reason it’s probably not “official” is because Microsoft likely doesn’t want blowback.