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Mastodon Is the Good One
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Technology
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They don't falsely advertise themselves as decentralized. They are decentralized even if you've come up with your own definition where there can be multiple "centralized" entities in control of the system.
There is no central authority in mastodon. There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email (which is also decentralized).
Nostr is also decentralized but it's decentralized by a relay (? -- the name of this sort of thing isn't super well established; they've never really caught on) system (which is a twist on peer-to-peer models that overcomes some of the issues with peer to peer tech) instead of using federation.
There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don't want to talk to anybody else.
If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can't move to another server. You can't communicate with other servers that got defederated. Exactly the same as Facebook and Twitter. It's only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn't, which already has happened numerous times in the past. The whole thing is basically just based around wishful thinking. If everybody would be niche to each other and servers would run forever, it would be totally fine, but that's not how the world works.
Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes. The saving grace with email is that you don't have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don't like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.
Those are completely different products, and you're continuing to abuse established terminology via your personal definitions.
I'm sorry but you don't know better than everybody else about what's centralized and what isn't.
Wrong again.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/
And yes, that's a solution with flaws (though, I think followers automatically migrate now too, note this is an old blog post) but that doesn't mean these things can't be fixed. Ultimately federation can facilitate a sort of "data transfer" to an entry new server, automatically, but it's a lot of work that hasn't been completely finished yet.
If you don't like any of the existing servers, start your own. There's no difference from that and using relays other than a server holds your data rather than your client(s) -- which is a big problem with peer-to-peer stuff.
I've moved providers several times. Email has pros and cons.
One pro over what mastodon has done is that you can use your own domain but somebody else's server, which allows you to reclaim account ownerships/redirect via (basically) changing some DNS entries (which works even if the server is offline/breaks the social contract and refuses access to account migration tools). That could be implemented in mastodon too, but then again few people want to do their own domain management.
People don't choose other providers because Google does it for free and they're a household name. There's not much pressure to go use Proton's more limited free plan or pay Proton or anyone like them.
🙄
But you can move to another server, you just can't take old posts with you
You can always move to another server. That's just the Web. As said, don't like Twitter? Move to Facebook. You don't need federation for that. Having to leave everything behind is the fundamental problem that federation fails to address.
Dumb analogy.
I can move to another Mastodon instance, and keep following the same accounts.
You can't. What you can and can't follow is determined by whatever the server federates with, which is not under your control. Also you lose all your followers and in case of server shutdown all the accounts on that server stop existing, so you can't follow them either.
Federation is a brittle framework that starts collapsing the moment anybody tries to use it seriously.
All you're arguing is that the web is decentralised, not that any given website within it is.
What do you think you are leaving behind? Your posts? Do you often go back and edit yours??
You take your network with you which is what people want to bring.
twitter is run by one company