7 ms·

Protocols, not platforms

101 points by allenbrunson 4y ago

sposeray 4y ago
[dead]
riffic 4y ago
Eugen Rochko is doing an "ask me anything" now in the Mastodon subreddit if anyone is curious. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109546596477513691 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109546596477513691
- allenbrunson 4y ago
  yep. good stuff! this is all new to me. eugen seems like a good steward of his platform.
agluszak 4y ago
> Right about the time a product achieves a near-monopoly, some genius product manager decides it is time to tighten the screws. Make search just a little bit worse, so the company can make more from ads. Make the user’s experience just a little bit worse, to increase engagement, and make more money from ads. That's exactly why capitalism must be regulated.
- notwokeno 4y ago
  IMO capitalism isn't the problem, non-free software is. We actually had chat interoperability between all the major social networks/email providers via XMPP and that ended about when the iPhone came out.
  - lucideer 4y ago
    > We actually had chat interoperability between all the major social networks No we didn't - XMPP is a federated protocol & none of the major networks ever supported federation. The XMPP protocol came with a lot of decently implemented open source packages that helped those companies get their chat systems off the ground & to a point where they could lock them in. Supporting federation from the beginning would've made that lock in much more difficult, so it wasn't in their interest. i.e. a capitalist disincentive. Capitalism is the problem, you're just doing your best to find excuses for it elsewhere.
    - ryukafalz 4y ago
      > XMPP is a federated protocol & none of the major networks ever supported federation. Google Talk did. It was the only one, though, so GP's assertion that multiple major networks did is indeed incorrect. But we came closer to federation between big players than you're implying. One more would have done it.
    - cmdrk 4y ago
      It can be a little bit of both. For what it's worth, for a time Google Chat federated other XMPP services and it worked just fine. They eventually shut that down for $GOOGLE_REASONS. Companies aggressively going after open source 3rd party clients caused interoperability to suffer greatly. Mandating open standards can help mitigate the most user-unfriendly parts, which often turns out to be the "business model".
- allenbrunson 4y ago
  you know what they say: capitalism is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones. i am at a loss as to what would work, here. (edit: whoops, democracy, not capitalism)
  - agluszak 4y ago
    Nitpick: they say it about democracy. Capitalism is (hopefully) not a form of government (yet). I'm not saying that we need a completely different system. We need more regulation. Stronger FTC in the US, more anti-monopolistic policies everywhere. Prevent big corporations from locking in their customers/users and creating walled gardens. Use open technologies in state administration[1]. Release publicly-funded code as open-source[2] Basically implement everything Electronic Frontier Foundation[3] and Free Software Foundation Europe[4] have been advocating for since forever. That would be a radical change, yes, but not a revolution and cOmMuNiSm. [1] https://element.io/blog/bundesmessenger-is-a-milestone-in-germanys-ground-breaking-vision/ https://element.io/blog/bundesmessenger-is-a-milestone-in-ge... [2] https://publiccode.eu/ https://publiccode.eu/ [3] https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/ [4] https://fsfe.org/ https://fsfe.org/
    - allenbrunson 4y ago
      right, democracy instead of capitalism, i should have looked it up. and yes, i would support all of that. the big roadblock, it seems to me, is that our government in the usa is now so dysfunctional as to make that stuff all but impossible. not sure how we get out of that quagmire.
  - ambientenv 4y ago
    "as to what would work" ... that's because we, the collective we, have not spent any sincere time and effort to find other ways. Capitalism in it's various incarnations and disguises has worked extremely well for just the right amount of people. Those days are coming to an end, and unlike, say, the laws of physics, we can adopt new beliefs, values and ways of doing things that benefit the collective we. Finance is basically made up as we go as it is.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > why capitalism must be regulated It is regulated, pretty heavily, and we still get shrinkflation. I'm not even sure what sort of regulation you could propose that would protect against that - you don't seriously believe that this doesn't happen in communist economies as well, do you?
luuuzeta 4y ago
>I can’t say that Twitter was exactly an exception to this rule, for me. I never liked it enough to contribute my own content to it. I do like its userbase enough to have spent many hours reading it, over the last couple of years. That all came to a screeching halt in the last month or so, when it was acquired by a tyrant. Oh my hyperbole, what would we do without you?! >Then came the exodus from Twitter, due to the tyrannical new owner. Many of the voices that I have come to appreciate the most are leaving. In particular, the ones with the highest morals were the first to jump ship. As well they should! If you stay on Twitter, the way it is now, and continue to contribute your content to it, then you are saying that you approve of the tyrant-in-chief banning reporters for writing about things that make him look bad. Oh my hyperbole! It's interesting to see the dichotomy between people who think Twitter was a safe haven and people who think it was a hellhole. And you can both support that Elon Musk shouldn't have been so trigger happy banning reporters without a clear policy in place AND that doxxing should earn you an instantaneous and permanent ban.
- allenbrunson 4y ago
  hey, here's an opportunity to respond to a thing i've seen going around a lot. in one respect, elon musk and i agree: the twitter bots that follow airplanes around are egregious and in poor taste. i would be fine with twitter having a policy saying that they are off-limits. ... but that's not at all what he did. his approach was erratic, scatter-shot, and full of post-hoc rationalizations. it's that sort of gaslighting and lying that is the real problem, not being against plane-tracking bots.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > when it was acquired by a tyrant Especially grating when you consider the previous owners were far more tyrannical for a much longer period of time.
  - luuuzeta 4y ago
    Exactly! I stopped reading when I reached that paragraph. I cannot take anyone pedestalizing journalists and leftists in general as "the ones with the highest morals" seriously, despite all what was going on with Twitter. After all it's not like it cannot be disproven quite easily. - Opaque moderation (at least more opaque than the current one) - Banning and shadowbanning users despite admitting the administration admitting they didn't violate company's ToS - Soft banning users regularly so they could build a case to outright ban them once and for all - Collusion with some three-letters agencies (see Twitter Files) to censor speech, bury newsworthy stories, etc - Journalists were treated as a separate class above regular users.
gambler 4y ago
When your revolution against "platforms" is led by people who host all their code on GitHub and have a public LinkedIn profile, you're not paying attention to your surroundings and will inevitably be taken advantage of.
- allenbrunson 4y ago
  i host, like, maybe two percent of my code on github. what's there is just for show. and i am no great fan of linkedin, that is for sure. same with facebook. but i am not quite such a big deal that i can afford to ignore all of those big bad platforms. i am not quite ready to go live in a cabin in the woods, in other words.
  - gambler 4y ago
    So, in essence, you don't have anything meaningful to respond with. You're perfectly fine with using centralized platforms when it's convenient and their ownership aligns with your ideology. You might say you don't like them, but you like them well enough to put links to them on your personal website.
    - allenbrunson 4y ago
      you seem to be advocating for absolutism: these things are bad, so abandon them completely. i don't think that's reasonable, or workable. there is basically no corporation in the world who has clean hands. i don't think it's possible to divest myself of all of them.
      - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
        I think it's not advocating for absolutism as much as moral consistency. You cannot in one stroke suggest that people who stay on Twitter are behaving immorally and supporting, among other things, the banning of journalists, while at the same time excusing your own use of Microsoft and Meta platforms with "[nobody] has clean hands".
allenbrunson 4y ago
(i stole the title from mike masnick. if he's upset about that, i would be happy to credit him, or change it.)
TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
People should also check out Bluesky and Nostr. Both are open protocols for social media.
- allenbrunson 4y ago
  agreed. if either one takes off and leaves mastodon in the dust, i am happy to support the winner, whatever that turns out to be.
distcs 4y ago
> Yes, Mastodon is more difficult to use than whatever social media platforms you are on now. What about Mastodon is more difficult to use? Isn't it just choosing a server, typing its URL, signing up for a new account and then you are ready to post? The UX does not look any more difficult than Twitter either. Both support search, hashtags, following people, creating lists, retweets (called boost in Mastodon), commenting. The UX looks and behaves similarly too. So why do people say that Mastodon is more difficult to use?
- jacooper 4y ago
  Choosing a server is incredibly confusing for the average joe
  - distcs 4y ago
    The average joe can just sign up for https://mastodon.social/ https://mastodon.social/ can't they? How is it really more difficult than signing up for Twitter or Facebook?
    - dymk 4y ago
      If you can figure out that’s the “main” server to go sign up on, sure. With Facebook and Twitter there is no question where to go sign up. That’s less clear with Mastodon. Simply knowing one has a choice of servers will turn some away.
      - distcs 4y ago
        Ok! Granted there is some effort to figure out which server to choose. Isn't everything as easy as Twitter after that? Arguably, it is even easier than Twitter because what really happens on Twitter these days is you sign up for an account, follow a few people, make a few posts and then suddenly find yourself to be blocked due to suspicious behavior. Mastodon is free of this nonsense so arguably Mastodon is easier to use?
        4y ago
jacooper 4y ago
> (As long as I am ranting: what the hell is up with billionaires, anyway? Quite a few of them have accumulated more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes, but still they want more. It’s disgraceful.) I mean its more like equity than real money they can directly spend. Also most of their wealth is in companies that are no where near worth their marketcap, such as Tesla which isn't even close to VW in sales, yet somhow is worth more. So once the hype dies down, or the founder sells enough stocks, the market cap is going to take a nose dive for sure. And as rich as elon is, we have seen how he is putting Billions into twitter, so they can spend it, just not in normal lifetime stuff.
- bin_bash 4y ago
  Economics Explained did a great video on the topic of how diversification is a big problem for some billionaires: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ
- seanhunter 4y ago
  I have met and worked with a few billionaires now and they all had one thing in common which I think explains some of this well. Firstly, they spend the _vast_ majority of their time with enablers, fluffers and sycophants fulfilling their every whim, constantly telling them how great they are and how brilliant all their ideas are etc. It's bad for anyone's ego to have only that sort of feedback. Someone once told me that because people are scared of giving powerful people bad news his theory of the organisation was a tree of monkeys. When you look up all you see is assholes and when you look down all you see is smiling faces. Well billionaires are at the top of most trees and so all they hear is good news and all they see is smiling faces. That means they become disconnected from reality to the point of seeming unhinged to the regular mass of people. Secondly, the billionaires I have met hang out a lot with other billionaires or similar ultra-rich folks. They are envious of people even more rich and successful than them until you get to the very top and there they are paranoid about losing their status to others on the rise. This makes the first phenomenon more acute and they radicalise each other. You can see this in the DMs that were published between members of Elon's circle leading up to the twitter acquisition. All sorts of people were telling him how brilliant a job he was going to do at twitter and how his idea of taking an axe to the org chart etc was the a surefire recipe for success.[1] [1] Check this out and you'll probably cringe like I did https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-musk-texts-twitter-trial-jack-dorsey/671619/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
distcs 4y ago
> Its decentralized nature makes some things a lot more difficult to pull off than its competitors. Help me understand one thing about Mastodon. We choose a Mastodon server to create account. What is decentralized about it? Doesn't choosing a server make it effectively centralized? I choose mastodon.social. What is there to stop mastodon.social from a change of ownership that makes it fall in the hands of people who take user-hostile decisions? I know we can create a new account on a new Mastodon server and move all the followers but that's about it. We can only move the followers. We cannot move our post history. So when I choose mastodon.social or any Mastodon server, am I not putting all my eggs in one basket again?
- serverholic 4y ago
  Yes. Also whoever runs the server can read your DMs. This is also true of big social networks however those companies usually have access controls that prevent employees from accessing private data. Some random mastodon server isn’t going to have that.
  - bin_bash 4y ago
    I don't understand why you're being downvoted. I'm not familiar with Mastodon's architecture but I highly doubt DMs have E2E encryption—so the server maintainers must be able to get to DMs. Correct me if @serverholic is wrong here.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
      We maintain a free messaging server for many years and believe me, there are far more important and interesting things to do for a server operator than looking at some random user DMs. It is simply not interesting.
      - distcs 4y ago
        So the answer is yes, the server operators can look at our random DMs. You may not be interested in looking at them but some other server operator might. So it is a good thing to know this beforehand to know what we are getting into.
carapace 4y ago
> If you are unfamiliar with Mastodon, you will no doubt wonder what the big deal is. How is this one going to be any different than its slimy competitors? I think it's important to remind people that Mastodon isn't a "competitor" to proprietary social media, it's an alternative. No one cares whether you use Mastodon or not-- I mean people do care, they like you and want to interact with you, that's not what I'm getting at. I mean that no one is getting paid or not if you do or don't use Mastodon. In other words, there's no stock ticker for it, there's no investors, no executives, no marketing dept., etc. It's just folks talking to each other, on their own terms, over the Internet. It's a totally different thing than Twitter. They only superficially resemble each other in some of the UI.
gemmy 4y ago
If you're looking for a social protocol that is even more decentralized than federated sites like Mastodon, have a look at Nostr. Every user account is just a public/private key pair. When you create a post, you sign it with you private key and the post is stored on a relay server. Anyone can run a relay server. I find Nostr much more exciting than federated sites, b/c it uses decentralized ids. You never have to worry about losing your social graph due to a federated server admin shutting down their server or banning you. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

101 points by allenbrunson 4y ago

[dead]

Eugen Rochko is doing an "ask me anything" now in the Mastodon subreddit if anyone is curious. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109546596477513691 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109546596477513691

allenbrunson 4y ago
yep. good stuff! this is all new to me. eugen seems like a good steward of his platform.

agluszak 4y ago

> Right about the time a product achieves a near-monopoly, some genius product manager decides it is time to tighten the screws. Make search just a little bit worse, so the company can make more from ads. Make the user’s experience just a little bit worse, to increase engagement, and make more money from ads. That's exactly why capitalism must be regulated.

notwokeno 4y ago
IMO capitalism isn't the problem, non-free software is. We actually had chat interoperability between all the major social networks/email providers via XMPP and that ended about when the iPhone came out.
- lucideer 4y ago
  > We actually had chat interoperability between all the major social networks No we didn't - XMPP is a federated protocol & none of the major networks ever supported federation. The XMPP protocol came with a lot of decently implemented open source packages that helped those companies get their chat systems off the ground & to a point where they could lock them in. Supporting federation from the beginning would've made that lock in much more difficult, so it wasn't in their interest. i.e. a capitalist disincentive. Capitalism is the problem, you're just doing your best to find excuses for it elsewhere.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    > XMPP is a federated protocol & none of the major networks ever supported federation. Google Talk did. It was the only one, though, so GP's assertion that multiple major networks did is indeed incorrect. But we came closer to federation between big players than you're implying. One more would have done it.
  - cmdrk 4y ago
    It can be a little bit of both. For what it's worth, for a time Google Chat federated other XMPP services and it worked just fine. They eventually shut that down for $GOOGLE_REASONS. Companies aggressively going after open source 3rd party clients caused interoperability to suffer greatly. Mandating open standards can help mitigate the most user-unfriendly parts, which often turns out to be the "business model".
allenbrunson 4y ago
you know what they say: capitalism is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones. i am at a loss as to what would work, here. (edit: whoops, democracy, not capitalism)
- agluszak 4y ago
  Nitpick: they say it about democracy. Capitalism is (hopefully) not a form of government (yet). I'm not saying that we need a completely different system. We need more regulation. Stronger FTC in the US, more anti-monopolistic policies everywhere. Prevent big corporations from locking in their customers/users and creating walled gardens. Use open technologies in state administration[1]. Release publicly-funded code as open-source[2] Basically implement everything Electronic Frontier Foundation[3] and Free Software Foundation Europe[4] have been advocating for since forever. That would be a radical change, yes, but not a revolution and cOmMuNiSm. [1] https://element.io/blog/bundesmessenger-is-a-milestone-in-germanys-ground-breaking-vision/ https://element.io/blog/bundesmessenger-is-a-milestone-in-ge... [2] https://publiccode.eu/ https://publiccode.eu/ [3] https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/ [4] https://fsfe.org/ https://fsfe.org/
  - allenbrunson 4y ago
    right, democracy instead of capitalism, i should have looked it up. and yes, i would support all of that. the big roadblock, it seems to me, is that our government in the usa is now so dysfunctional as to make that stuff all but impossible. not sure how we get out of that quagmire.
- ambientenv 4y ago
  "as to what would work" ... that's because we, the collective we, have not spent any sincere time and effort to find other ways. Capitalism in it's various incarnations and disguises has worked extremely well for just the right amount of people. Those days are coming to an end, and unlike, say, the laws of physics, we can adopt new beliefs, values and ways of doing things that benefit the collective we. Finance is basically made up as we go as it is.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> why capitalism must be regulated It is regulated, pretty heavily, and we still get shrinkflation. I'm not even sure what sort of regulation you could propose that would protect against that - you don't seriously believe that this doesn't happen in communist economies as well, do you?

luuuzeta 4y ago

>I can’t say that Twitter was exactly an exception to this rule, for me. I never liked it enough to contribute my own content to it. I do like its userbase enough to have spent many hours reading it, over the last couple of years. That all came to a screeching halt in the last month or so, when it was acquired by a tyrant. Oh my hyperbole, what would we do without you?! >Then came the exodus from Twitter, due to the tyrannical new owner. Many of the voices that I have come to appreciate the most are leaving. In particular, the ones with the highest morals were the first to jump ship. As well they should! If you stay on Twitter, the way it is now, and continue to contribute your content to it, then you are saying that you approve of the tyrant-in-chief banning reporters for writing about things that make him look bad. Oh my hyperbole! It's interesting to see the dichotomy between people who think Twitter was a safe haven and people who think it was a hellhole. And you can both support that Elon Musk shouldn't have been so trigger happy banning reporters without a clear policy in place AND that doxxing should earn you an instantaneous and permanent ban.

allenbrunson 4y ago
hey, here's an opportunity to respond to a thing i've seen going around a lot. in one respect, elon musk and i agree: the twitter bots that follow airplanes around are egregious and in poor taste. i would be fine with twitter having a policy saying that they are off-limits. ... but that's not at all what he did. his approach was erratic, scatter-shot, and full of post-hoc rationalizations. it's that sort of gaslighting and lying that is the real problem, not being against plane-tracking bots.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> when it was acquired by a tyrant Especially grating when you consider the previous owners were far more tyrannical for a much longer period of time.
- luuuzeta 4y ago
  Exactly! I stopped reading when I reached that paragraph. I cannot take anyone pedestalizing journalists and leftists in general as "the ones with the highest morals" seriously, despite all what was going on with Twitter. After all it's not like it cannot be disproven quite easily. - Opaque moderation (at least more opaque than the current one) - Banning and shadowbanning users despite admitting the administration admitting they didn't violate company's ToS - Soft banning users regularly so they could build a case to outright ban them once and for all - Collusion with some three-letters agencies (see Twitter Files) to censor speech, bury newsworthy stories, etc - Journalists were treated as a separate class above regular users.

gambler 4y ago

When your revolution against "platforms" is led by people who host all their code on GitHub and have a public LinkedIn profile, you're not paying attention to your surroundings and will inevitably be taken advantage of.

allenbrunson 4y ago
i host, like, maybe two percent of my code on github. what's there is just for show. and i am no great fan of linkedin, that is for sure. same with facebook. but i am not quite such a big deal that i can afford to ignore all of those big bad platforms. i am not quite ready to go live in a cabin in the woods, in other words.
- gambler 4y ago
  So, in essence, you don't have anything meaningful to respond with. You're perfectly fine with using centralized platforms when it's convenient and their ownership aligns with your ideology. You might say you don't like them, but you like them well enough to put links to them on your personal website.
  - allenbrunson 4y ago
    you seem to be advocating for absolutism: these things are bad, so abandon them completely. i don't think that's reasonable, or workable. there is basically no corporation in the world who has clean hands. i don't think it's possible to divest myself of all of them.
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
      I think it's not advocating for absolutism as much as moral consistency. You cannot in one stroke suggest that people who stay on Twitter are behaving immorally and supporting, among other things, the banning of journalists, while at the same time excusing your own use of Microsoft and Meta platforms with "[nobody] has clean hands".

allenbrunson 4y ago

(i stole the title from mike masnick. if he's upset about that, i would be happy to credit him, or change it.)

TheMagicHorsey 4y ago

People should also check out Bluesky and Nostr. Both are open protocols for social media.

allenbrunson 4y ago
agreed. if either one takes off and leaves mastodon in the dust, i am happy to support the winner, whatever that turns out to be.

distcs 4y ago

> Yes, Mastodon is more difficult to use than whatever social media platforms you are on now. What about Mastodon is more difficult to use? Isn't it just choosing a server, typing its URL, signing up for a new account and then you are ready to post? The UX does not look any more difficult than Twitter either. Both support search, hashtags, following people, creating lists, retweets (called boost in Mastodon), commenting. The UX looks and behaves similarly too. So why do people say that Mastodon is more difficult to use?

jacooper 4y ago
Choosing a server is incredibly confusing for the average joe
- distcs 4y ago
  The average joe can just sign up for https://mastodon.social/ https://mastodon.social/ can't they? How is it really more difficult than signing up for Twitter or Facebook?
  - dymk 4y ago
    If you can figure out that’s the “main” server to go sign up on, sure. With Facebook and Twitter there is no question where to go sign up. That’s less clear with Mastodon. Simply knowing one has a choice of servers will turn some away.
    - distcs 4y ago
      Ok! Granted there is some effort to figure out which server to choose. Isn't everything as easy as Twitter after that? Arguably, it is even easier than Twitter because what really happens on Twitter these days is you sign up for an account, follow a few people, make a few posts and then suddenly find yourself to be blocked due to suspicious behavior. Mastodon is free of this nonsense so arguably Mastodon is easier to use?
      - 4y ago

jacooper 4y ago

> (As long as I am ranting: what the hell is up with billionaires, anyway? Quite a few of them have accumulated more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes, but still they want more. It’s disgraceful.) I mean its more like equity than real money they can directly spend. Also most of their wealth is in companies that are no where near worth their marketcap, such as Tesla which isn't even close to VW in sales, yet somhow is worth more. So once the hype dies down, or the founder sells enough stocks, the market cap is going to take a nose dive for sure. And as rich as elon is, we have seen how he is putting Billions into twitter, so they can spend it, just not in normal lifetime stuff.

bin_bash 4y ago
Economics Explained did a great video on the topic of how diversification is a big problem for some billionaires: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ
seanhunter 4y ago
I have met and worked with a few billionaires now and they all had one thing in common which I think explains some of this well. Firstly, they spend the _vast_ majority of their time with enablers, fluffers and sycophants fulfilling their every whim, constantly telling them how great they are and how brilliant all their ideas are etc. It's bad for anyone's ego to have only that sort of feedback. Someone once told me that because people are scared of giving powerful people bad news his theory of the organisation was a tree of monkeys. When you look up all you see is assholes and when you look down all you see is smiling faces. Well billionaires are at the top of most trees and so all they hear is good news and all they see is smiling faces. That means they become disconnected from reality to the point of seeming unhinged to the regular mass of people. Secondly, the billionaires I have met hang out a lot with other billionaires or similar ultra-rich folks. They are envious of people even more rich and successful than them until you get to the very top and there they are paranoid about losing their status to others on the rise. This makes the first phenomenon more acute and they radicalise each other. You can see this in the DMs that were published between members of Elon's circle leading up to the twitter acquisition. All sorts of people were telling him how brilliant a job he was going to do at twitter and how his idea of taking an axe to the org chart etc was the a surefire recipe for success.[1] [1] Check this out and you'll probably cringe like I did https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-musk-texts-twitter-trial-jack-dorsey/671619/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...

distcs 4y ago

> Its decentralized nature makes some things a lot more difficult to pull off than its competitors. Help me understand one thing about Mastodon. We choose a Mastodon server to create account. What is decentralized about it? Doesn't choosing a server make it effectively centralized? I choose mastodon.social. What is there to stop mastodon.social from a change of ownership that makes it fall in the hands of people who take user-hostile decisions? I know we can create a new account on a new Mastodon server and move all the followers but that's about it. We can only move the followers. We cannot move our post history. So when I choose mastodon.social or any Mastodon server, am I not putting all my eggs in one basket again?

serverholic 4y ago
Yes. Also whoever runs the server can read your DMs. This is also true of big social networks however those companies usually have access controls that prevent employees from accessing private data. Some random mastodon server isn’t going to have that.
- bin_bash 4y ago
  I don't understand why you're being downvoted. I'm not familiar with Mastodon's architecture but I highly doubt DMs have E2E encryption—so the server maintainers must be able to get to DMs. Correct me if @serverholic is wrong here.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    We maintain a free messaging server for many years and believe me, there are far more important and interesting things to do for a server operator than looking at some random user DMs. It is simply not interesting.
    - distcs 4y ago
      So the answer is yes, the server operators can look at our random DMs. You may not be interested in looking at them but some other server operator might. So it is a good thing to know this beforehand to know what we are getting into.

carapace 4y ago

> If you are unfamiliar with Mastodon, you will no doubt wonder what the big deal is. How is this one going to be any different than its slimy competitors? I think it's important to remind people that Mastodon isn't a "competitor" to proprietary social media, it's an alternative. No one cares whether you use Mastodon or not-- I mean people do care, they like you and want to interact with you, that's not what I'm getting at. I mean that no one is getting paid or not if you do or don't use Mastodon. In other words, there's no stock ticker for it, there's no investors, no executives, no marketing dept., etc. It's just folks talking to each other, on their own terms, over the Internet. It's a totally different thing than Twitter. They only superficially resemble each other in some of the UI.

gemmy 4y ago

If you're looking for a social protocol that is even more decentralized than federated sites like Mastodon, have a look at Nostr. Every user account is just a public/private key pair. When you create a post, you sign it with you private key and the post is stored on a relay server. Anyone can run a relay server. I find Nostr much more exciting than federated sites, b/c it uses decentralized ids. You never have to worry about losing your social graph due to a federated server admin shutting down their server or banning you. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr