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> It is also decentralized. I guess this is subjective, but I don't really consider Mastodon to be (very) decentralised; it's federated, like email. Your accou

> It is also decentralized. I guess this is subjective, but I don't really consider Mastodon to be (very) decentralised; it's federated, like email. Your account exists on only a single node—with that account you are free to communicate with any node, but you still have a single host/entity maintaining your identity. If you want an example of a working decentralised social platform, have a look at https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ > However, I have not found that it works particularly well as a decentralized social platform. 100% of the people I follow and the people who follow me are on the mastodon instance I'm on While I like the idea of proper decentralisation, I don't really see the problem with what you describe. Mastodon seems like a success even if every user only follows other users on their own instance. The point is that it is potentially possible for you to migrate to another provider and still follow the same friend list—vendor lock-in isn't possible. Just like email. This isn't perfect of course—we almost had this with Facebook and GoogleChat but they both gained such a critical mass of users that they could shutoff XMPP support without user backlash, and Gmail also maintains a similarly locked-in status even while supporting federated standards (IMAP/SMTP) simply by making that support, and migration, needlessly complex. This is why decentralisation matters. Federation is still pretty cool though.

woah 8y ago
I would consider scuttlebutt to be federated as well, since it’s difficult to communicate to other users without a pub server
- Confiks 8y ago
  Scuttlebutt's pubs are only dumb caching pipes, whereas a Mastodon server is actually the source of your content. That's the fundamental difference between the two. As every Scuttlebutt node is equal to every other node, that makes it a distributed, rather than merely decentralized, protocol.
- lucideer 8y ago
  It's difficult right now, but the clients are very much under development—DHT is being worked on in Manyverse for example. The important thing is that the protocols are not designed to be reliant on pubs in the long run.

woah 8y ago

I would consider scuttlebutt to be federated as well, since it’s difficult to communicate to other users without a pub server

Confiks 8y ago
Scuttlebutt's pubs are only dumb caching pipes, whereas a Mastodon server is actually the source of your content. That's the fundamental difference between the two. As every Scuttlebutt node is equal to every other node, that makes it a distributed, rather than merely decentralized, protocol.
lucideer 8y ago
It's difficult right now, but the clients are very much under development—DHT is being worked on in Manyverse for example. The important thing is that the protocols are not designed to be reliant on pubs in the long run.