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The problem with centralized social media is that the admins have power over you. They can ban your account with no recourse, censor some of your posts (or some

The problem with centralized social media is that the admins have power over you. They can ban your account with no recourse, censor some of your posts (or some posts you want to read), or even post something from your own account that you don't approve of. Mastodon doesn't change this, it just changes who the admins are. It lets a person under the jurisdiction of admin A interact with a person under the jurisdiction of admin B, which is better than fully-centralized X, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Your instance admin can still ban you with no recourse (account migration is incomplete, requires cooperation on both sides, and mostly exists to shut up Activitypub opponents who point these problems out). They're still just as (if not vulnerable) to government pressure as centralized social media, and considering that a single lawsuit could probably bankrupt most instances, I suspect they'd fold very very quickly. They can (and very often do) defederate from instances that post "too much nazi content", and if you disagree with the decision, there's again no recourse (you can migrate, but you won't get your lost relationships back).

yoshuaw 9mo ago
A lot of us are our own instance admins, with our own accounts being the only accounts associated with our domains. I don't self-host though; I pay a dedicated hosting provider to handle this for me. This means I end up having a very similar relationship to my Mastodon provider as to my email- and cloud storage providers.
account42 9mo ago
> They can (and very often do) defederate from instances that post "too much nazi content", and if you disagree with the decision, there's again no recourse (you can migrate, but you won't get your lost relationships back). Worse, they defederate instances that don't also defederate instances that they dislike badly enough so you can't even have neutral instances where you can communicate with everyone.
- jrm4 9mo ago
  Yes, very good point sure. I (as a Black not-right-wing person) have huge problems with the whole "The Bad Place" thing (long story short, Black folks that I generally agree with politically are absolutely horribly ban-heavy and way too power-trippy on moderation.)
direwolf20 9mo ago
Is there any other way to deal with spammers that can't be applied to non-spammers by a malicious admin?

yoshuaw 9mo ago

A lot of us are our own instance admins, with our own accounts being the only accounts associated with our domains. I don't self-host though; I pay a dedicated hosting provider to handle this for me. This means I end up having a very similar relationship to my Mastodon provider as to my email- and cloud storage providers.

account42 9mo ago

> They can (and very often do) defederate from instances that post "too much nazi content", and if you disagree with the decision, there's again no recourse (you can migrate, but you won't get your lost relationships back). Worse, they defederate instances that don't also defederate instances that they dislike badly enough so you can't even have neutral instances where you can communicate with everyone.

jrm4 9mo ago
Yes, very good point sure. I (as a Black not-right-wing person) have huge problems with the whole "The Bad Place" thing (long story short, Black folks that I generally agree with politically are absolutely horribly ban-heavy and way too power-trippy on moderation.)

direwolf20 9mo ago

Is there any other way to deal with spammers that can't be applied to non-spammers by a malicious admin?