Truth Social is a success story for free software.
People who could have been subjected to some proprietary software due to
their interest in one certain celebrity are now using a (largely/mostly)
free software service, thanks to Mastodon and the AGPL. They can benefit
from years of development focused on community rather than advertisers.
They can also benefit from external analysis of what we know about their
variant of the code, which might be little but it's more than nothing.
You might discount those benefits as minimal, but they're not trivial
and they're multiplied by the millions of people receiving them right now.
We don't know what's going to happen in the future, but thanks to free
software (and open standards) the people have multiple possibilities. If
some conflict arises, subcommunities might splinter and move to their
own instances with lesser disruption. If the company fails and decides
to discontinue the service, another service provider might take it over
and make it better; users could even take matters in their hands with
limited capital, thanks to lower costs.
You might consider this a distant possibility, or something you don't
care about because you'd prefer the community to just vanish, but it has
a non-zero probability. That reduces the centralised power of the
current owners, even if just by a little, and that's certainly a good thing.
Federico
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