I’d like to publish this letter on our blog and distribute around, but first I want to gather feedback from the community as to represent us all. Please offer your comments below and I’ll get them incorporated!
To the Mastodon Community –
Hi, friends. We’re ThreeFold. Pleased to meet you! As firm believers and actors in open-souce and decentralization, we’re thrilled to see your community growing over the past weeks. A well-deserved congratulations!
A little bit about us, and why we’re writing this letter… ThreeFold is a movement of people around the world together building a decentralized Internet infrastructure to enable a better future for us all. We envision an Internet that puts the planet and people first and operates on strong authenticity.
The project has been active for the past six years, although our founders have been contributors to the Internet and Cloud space for more than two decades. So they know first-hand the issues and challenges of the centralized Internet, and they know how to fix it.
Mastodon and the Fediverse as a whole represent not only a belief in a decentralized digital world, but real actions to make that world a reality. Independently-run servers interconnecting people together, it reminds us how the Internet began… For us, this original intent of the Internet is what we are focused on realizing. And now the recent influx of newcomers to the Fediverse is a strong signal that we are not alone.
An open, decentralized future is about collaboration, not competition; love, not fear. It is an essential paradigm shift that we are ready for, and we know you are as well.
We see clear ways of how ThreeFold can support Mastodon and the Fediverse, and the other way around. ThreeFold is making it easy for anyone and everyone to create their own server through the ThreeFold Playground, so you are in full control. And it’s on a decentralized infrastructure. Right now this is on devnet and we’ll move to mainnet asap after some testing. (Already one of our community members has deployed instances of Mastodon, PeerTube, and Funkwhale on top of the ThreeFold Grid – pretty cool, right?!)
Additionally, we’ll make it possible to co-own communities via smart contract – so if some nodes (servers) leave or go offline, the server is still viable. So any group of people can chip in some money and co-own their own Mastodon server (instance). By creating your own community, you will also be able to ask people for contributions in order to operate the server, etc. And you can set and maintain your own moderation standards.
Lastly, we’ll focus on authentication. Today on Mastodon, it’s only email based, which means it’s easy for people to hide. ThreeFold can enable different verification options – email-based, ThreeFold Connect (our two-factor authentication tool), and even KYC. So each server can set their own standards.
For those of you who have been building, contributing to, and using Mastodon for a while, you likely see how we can intersect. If you’re just getting on Mastodon, all of this might seem a bit complex. You might even be noticing some differences between Twitter and the Mastodon experience. This is the reality of decentralization. But there is beauty in this complexity, it means we regain control of our digital lives. As Uncle Ben said, with great power comes great responsibility.
We invite you to our two-way chat and to our forum (note the Fediverse category). And we look forward to working together to build the digital world we all dream of.
Any friend of Mastadon’s is a friend of ThreeFold’s.
With love and great respect,
The ThreeFold Community