> We tested Lydon against a bunch of other people, and he came out top among Britain's housewives because they felt he was so uncompromising, he'd never just do an ad for the money - he'd only do it if he genuinely believed what he was saying.

> In other words, he was the best person to do what we were paying him to do, because he would never do what we were paying him to do, so if he did that, it's OK.

> So Mastodon is what we don’t need. What do we need right now?

> Decentralized protocols — true distributed social platforms — are very possible. There’s already a chat protocol, called Tox, that leverages a distributed hash table to store information globally across all instances, without permitting anyone to access information they don’t have the key for. It has many different clients, no centralized API with absurd limitations, and no one specially privileged official client. It’s not for persistent messaging and posts, of course, but it’s not terribly difficult to imagine a protocol that could archive content locally, that operates without any central servers or control. If we’re going to allow ourselves to be driven off Twitter, let’s not be lazy about it. Let’s work together and build something no corporation can control, and no one accident — or calculated act of malice — can wipe out.