Because Threads is where the mainstream people are going due to ease of use/marketing/popularity and familiarity with other Meta products. Which is why Threads integration with ActivityPub and not defederating with threads.net is so key
Mastodon is boring. I left Twitter years ago, and don’t miss it. I joined Mastodon like 2 years ago, I like it, but still find it boring.
It’s federated, not decentralized. Which even Mastodon itself doesn’t seem to realize or care, since they falsely advertise themselves as decentralized.
Decentralized means there is no central authority.
Federation just means there are many centralized authorities, that might or might not communicate with each other.
I really don’t see what Mastodon is supposed to solve in the long run. The server has full control and can do whatever it wants. Just look at what happened Threads.net. Big company joins the Fediverse and instead of celebrating, everybody starts thinking about defederating them. This approach is doomed to fail if it ever gets popular.
Nostr looks like a much more promising approach, with proper cryptographic identities and signatures. Nobody owns you there. Servers are just dumb relays. If one steps out of line, you can just use another one.
How does a completely decentralized platform handle data that should be removed? If some asshole starts posting CP or other fucked up shit, what exactly happens? With mastodont the server admin has the control to remove whatever he or she wants. Not perfect, but you have plenty of servers to choose from (or you can start your own).
You want something like society, mostly free but still with some ground rules. If it’s completely free there is also lots of scams and shady stuff. In the long run I think a platform like that will be banned by governments.
How does a completely decentralized platform handle data that should be removed?
You make a blacklists of forbidden content and relays can use or ignore it. It’s up to the relay, there is no central authority that can make content go away globally. Nostr is build to be censorship-resistent.
In the long run I think a platform like that
It’s not a platform, it’s just a protocol and apps using that protocol.
look at what happened Threads.net. Big company joins the Fediverse and instead of celebrating, everybody starts thinking about defederating them. This approach is doomed to fail if it ever gets popular.
Let’s not forget threads planned to monetize every interaction it was aware of, regardless of any direct interaction with Facebook/Meta. The public pushback probably went a long way towards setting a precedent against that sort of activity. We’re really breaking new ground here and have a chance to take back what is increasingly an essential function of society from folks who would rather fill every waking moment of your life with ads.
Let’s not forget threads planned to monetize every interaction it was aware of,
So does GMail. Making money running a bit of the network should not be a problem, quite the opposite, that just means the network won’t run out of money. This kind of arbitrary enforcing of political ideology should have no place this low in the network structure.
Let’s not forget we’re really breaking new ground here
We really aren’t. It’s just repeating what EMail and Usenet have done for 40 years.
People underestimate the need for something like this. Society is only going to become more and more censored and monitored as technology evolves. It’s not possible to escape that, so using communication where you are private is going to be extreamly important.
Also it needs to be able to resist being banned by governments.
They don’t falsely advertise themselves as decentralized. They are decentralized even if you’ve come up with your own definition where there can be multiple “centralized” entities in control of the system.
There is no central authority in mastodon. There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email (which is also decentralized).
Nostr is also decentralized but it’s decentralized by a relay (? – the name of this sort of thing isn’t super well established; they’ve never really caught on) system (which is a twist on peer-to-peer models that overcomes some of the issues with peer to peer tech) instead of using federation.
There is no central authority in mastodon.
There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don’t want to talk to anybody else.
If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can’t move to another server. You can’t communicate with other servers that got defederated. Exactly the same as Facebook and Twitter. It’s only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn’t, which already has happened numerous times in the past. The whole thing is basically just based around wishful thinking. If everybody would be niche to each other and servers would run forever, it would be totally fine, but that’s not how the world works.
There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email
Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes. The saving grace with email is that you don’t have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don’t like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.
There is no central authority in mastodon.
There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don’t want to talk to anybody else.
Those are completely different products, and you’re continuing to abuse established terminology via your personal definitions.
I’m sorry but you don’t know better than everybody else about what’s centralized and what isn’t.
If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can’t move to another server.
Wrong again.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/
And yes, that’s a solution with flaws (though, I think followers automatically migrate now too, note this is an old blog post) but that doesn’t mean these things can’t be fixed. Ultimately federation can facilitate a sort of “data transfer” to an entry new server, automatically, but it’s a lot of work that hasn’t been completely finished yet.
It’s only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn’t, which already has happened numerous times in the past.
If you don’t like any of the existing servers, start your own. There’s no difference from that and using relays other than a server holds your data rather than your client(s) – which is a big problem with peer-to-peer stuff.
Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes.
I’ve moved providers several times. Email has pros and cons.
One pro over what mastodon has done is that you can use your own domain but somebody else’s server, which allows you to reclaim account ownerships/redirect via (basically) changing some DNS entries (which works even if the server is offline/breaks the social contract and refuses access to account migration tools). That could be implemented in mastodon too, but then again few people want to do their own domain management.
People don’t choose other providers because Google does it for free and they’re a household name. There’s not much pressure to go use Proton’s more limited free plan or pay Proton or anyone like them.
The saving grace with email is that you don’t have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don’t like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.
🙄
But you can move to another server, you just can’t take old posts with you
I’ve really enjoyed mastodon. The community is pretty great and it seems to have plenty of features.
Filter by Hot, Active and Top Day are godsends for Lemmy. I understand the lack of blackbox algorithm but zero control over your timeline outside of Chronological and tags kills Mastodon for a lot of people.
