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I may not be parsing you correctly, but in what sense do you mean consensus? I think Mastodon simply relies on there being a single authoritative source of mate

I may not be parsing you correctly, but in what sense do you mean consensus? I think Mastodon simply relies on there being a single authoritative source of material from any address, and then that goes out to various places local and remote depending on details. I'm not sure that's really consensus so much as message delivery, I don't think anyone would notice if posts arrived out of order (for instance). It strikes me as well enough served by a database that gets updates from users on an instance. So I guess, admittedly I may well not understand, but what does consensus have to do with it?

klabb3 4y ago
Sure. I noticed that many people come from the angle that decentralization implies defi, because they've seen the last few years of decentralization practically be synonymous with blockchains. I'm just responding to that, and saying that there's lots of interesting applications possible in the decentralized space that don't involve blockchains or finance. Blockchains are just a global append-only stack of messages with global consensus. Mastodon isn't decentralized so I didn't intend to compare them at all. That said, I think federated systems are interesting and have a place, because full decentralization is often impractical.