3 ms·
Moderation, hosting fees, legal liability, responsibility for accounts (people invest a lot of time in creating content tied to your instance), security,etc...
by _8j50 3y ago
Moderation, hosting fees, legal liability, responsibility for accounts (people invest a lot of time in creating content tied to your instance), security,etc... it is federated but all the legal,security, infra,moderation,etc... people across the world that support twitter and the like are no longer there for your mastodon instance but the only thing there that scales down/up with respect to the number of active users is infra support staffing/costs. Everything else is "decentralized" but since it isn't a technical problem, much like most things foss, the responsibility is transfered to whomever runs a mastodon instance assuming they have taken all the neccesary steps to be responsible and reliable in every regard. But in reality, the user is expected to find out through trial and error and word of mouth, which instance is being operated properly. Matrix and other decentralized systems have the same problem.
- Angostura 3y agoBut you're just saying that the people who run the servers have to run the servers. You don't have to run your own instance - just join one you fancy. So yes, the difficulty then becomes "is this instance being properly run?" but thats not unique to Mastodon, it also applies to things like Twitter - as we've seen. Just without the option to jump to a better Twitter instance - because there is only one.
- _8j50 3y agoI agree with that, except Twitter is one, mastodon is many. For example, my first attempt to use mastodon failed because all the instances wanted an email address and just giving that alone or using temp email was not worth it for me. With twitter, it is one "instance" and I don't have to sample a dozen to figure out which one is right so because it is just one, I setup an email and even a temp burner phone for it in the past. But the risk of having to move to another mastodon is weighty.