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> Centralization works and is highly preferable for many users. I don't think users care about that at all, and if they have it explained to them, hate it. I t

> Centralization works and is highly preferable for many users. I don't think users care about that at all, and if they have it explained to them, hate it. I think the real problem is that we haven't decentralized ownership and decisionmaking, instead we shattered big dictatorships into little fiefdoms, often run by local gangs (as one would expect.) Arguing that federation should automatically solve our problems with social media is like the US argument for "state's rights." You had one problem, now you have 50. This is also exacerbated by the fact that people can't migrate. That would seem like it should be a developer priority to enable competition between instances, but instead people get irritated when asked about it at all. Every post locks you in farther to a particular instance. If people can leave on a whim, bad instances would starve. Instead of people being able to vote with their feet, the politics of mastodon all revolve around punishing other instances for various examples wrongthink by defederating. So now it's little fiefdoms at war with each other, you have to be in the in-crowd of your likely randomly chosen instance to have a say about it, and if you leave you lose everything.

jeroenhd 2y ago
My experience is that tons of people heard about Mastodon when the first wave of Musk bullshit hit Twitter and they immediately had an allergic reaction to having to pick a server. They don't realise there's no practical difference from email (which they're already using) but somehow the need to pick a server baffles and confuses the average social media user. Instead, everyone seems to be joining Bluesky now, which is also federated but doesn't mention it anywhere so users can just join the main instance. I expect this will cause massive problems in the future when federation will start taking place on a serious scale and the risks of misleading users by using similar usernames on other servers start applying. People don't know the network is federated and there's no easy way to read up about it without diving into dev documents.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  Even the “main instance” on bluesky is a cluster of instances; it’s just not exposed in a way that causes the choice issue. And since you have full account portability, if you ever want to change, it’s at least possible.

jeroenhd 2y ago

My experience is that tons of people heard about Mastodon when the first wave of Musk bullshit hit Twitter and they immediately had an allergic reaction to having to pick a server. They don't realise there's no practical difference from email (which they're already using) but somehow the need to pick a server baffles and confuses the average social media user. Instead, everyone seems to be joining Bluesky now, which is also federated but doesn't mention it anywhere so users can just join the main instance. I expect this will cause massive problems in the future when federation will start taking place on a serious scale and the risks of misleading users by using similar usernames on other servers start applying. People don't know the network is federated and there's no easy way to read up about it without diving into dev documents.

steveklabnik 2y ago
Even the “main instance” on bluesky is a cluster of instances; it’s just not exposed in a way that causes the choice issue. And since you have full account portability, if you ever want to change, it’s at least possible.