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This shouldn’t be a surprise. Public figures tend to not know how things work, and politicians tend to be optimistic about things that big businesses are spending a lot of money on.
AI sounds great in an elevator pitch, and that’s all most politicians and execuitive-level business folks are working with. And they’re all very susceptible to “everyone else is doing it” type arguments.
Mastodon servers are separate entities, too. The fact that they communicate with each other doesn’t change that, and the persistent desire that folks here have to imagine otherwise is a hurdle to adoption.
The mental model is of a central space that instances grant or bar access to, but that’s simply not how the technology actually works. Too much effort has gone into trying to make ActivityPub-enabled websites look like something they’re not (centralized social media), while totally ignoring what they are: small forums and microblogs that have optional access to other forums and microblogs.
Mastodon is web server software. “Mastodon” doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. And the fact that everyone keeps trying to sell this illusion is exactly why there are all of these broken expectations and hurdles.