No, this is not the same old shit, because while yes of course humans are still humans and will do shitty human things the difference is that there is no easy way to enclose the Fediverse and force an opinion, censor people speaking out against injustice. or hold the entire network hostage to push a profit for investors.

The Fediverse is still definitely vulnerable to those things, and who knows if longterm whether a large corporation or constellation of authoritarian regimes can critically undermine the Fediverse (we will certainly see attempts at some point), but no matter what happens, anybody can still spin up their own instance of Mastodon, Lemmy or any other fediverse software and start creating a new community.

From the perspective of an authoritarian ruling class, the problem of quelling dissent in the masses has gone from buying the one or two tv conglomerate networks that provide news for 100s of millions of people, buying Twitter and sabotaging it, or buying Reddit and paying someone to manipulate it with bots and ban people saying things they don’t like, to a Sisyphean hell of having to keep stamping out Fediverse communities wherever they pop up, in whatever country or legal context they happen to pop up all over the globe.

If you think that the Fediverse taking off and reaching a critical mass where lots of people use it daily for normal social media stuff isn’t a strategic failure for the dictators and ruthless capitalists willing to create mass murder if it nets them a profit, I don’t know what to tell you…

edit maybe this is going too into the conspiracy weeds here to be useful to conjecture about, but until the Fediverse took off virtually ALL online communities with any vibrancy were moving to Discord, and it scared the hell out of me because it would have made the attempt to silence dissent right now across the world and more specifically in my country a trivial task if there was simply no alternative that was anywhere near ready to function for people as a basis for their community. Corporate social media is full of voices refusing to be silenced about the Palestinian Genocide… but would those activists feel so comfortable and would corporate social media companies feel restrained at all if there was no truly no alternative to their social network for communicating online?

I will never forget how almost everybody in my life would basically laugh at me years ago when I voiced concern about Discord vacuuming up seemingly every significant online community, but just think about how right now would be vastly different if activists had NOWHERE to go online if they got banned from Twitter or Discord or Reddit…