I have the feeling that people confuse 'federated' (aka provides API access) with 'distributed' (aka does not rely on specific nodes).
But in this case, even if mastododon.social went down, your posts would still be available on the network and through your own (and other) mastodon instances.
In terms of the API, this is a open source project and it needs to communicate with other nodes in the network; I believe this puts real limits on how much they can change the API.
One nice side effect is that you get less of this kind of person on the fediverse.
I also think you misunderstand how following works on the Fediverse. My main account is on a small server with about 400 users, about 50 of which are active daily, I guess. But I have around 1000 followers, almost all of whom are on other instances (probably 20 or so are on my instance).
This is only my opinion, but I think the gathering of followers and likes is something that the commercial product requires in order to keep people engaging with a product that they might otherwise put to the side.
I think you mean federated vs. decentralized since federated is also distributed.
And before people jump into a blockchain discussion remember that blockchain ⊂ decentralization, so, in general, you (probably) don't need a blockchain to decentralized an application.
'Like' is a kind of message on ActivityPub, and it can be sent from one instance to another (decentralized like email, not distributed like BitTorrent). All messages are signed by the originating server (using HTTP Signatures [0]), so you can verify that the message is actually being sent by that instance, that it has not been tampered with, and that the user the message is attributed to is a user on that instance.
There's also an option in the spec to sign message contents with JSON-LD signatures[1] using a key pair specific to the user. Mastodon and Pleroma don't use these because they're considered unnecessary and may have certain drawbacks.
[0]: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-cavage-http-signatures-01.ht... [1]: https://w3c-dvcg.github.io/ld-signatures/
There is no true Mastodon instance, mastodon.social is merely the biggest. I run my own mastodon instance and can federate just fine.
Federation is distributed to some extend. However, unlike pure p2p where everyone has a node, it's more like little towns and cities where people live together voluntarily. Each one is a different size, each has it's own rules and if people don't like the rules, they can leave and go elsewhere.
Edit: meant to say Twitter and not Mastodon, to get the point across.
You would lose all subscribers, likes, comments etc.
Then you would have to find a way to prove to 'your' old friends that jbb67@someotherodomain.com is the same person as the person that formerly was 'jbb67@mastodon.social'. And have some of them follow you again etc.
The same process as if you changed from Twitter to Facebook.
At least you would have choices of who to trust on Mastodon, or if you trust no one then run your own instance.
based on my experience on fedi, i think you are exaggerating the fragility of the connections you make on social media. clicking "follow" isn't a lot of effort and people will do it when they recognize your voice coming from a new source.
Having your own domain name represents YOUR identity/persona on the web - nay, overall internet in fact. The focus here is on the portion AFTER the @ symbol. Yes, unfortunately for now, owning your own domain - for the purposes of interacting with other instances and people via these federation-type of technologies - also involves the overhead of hosting your own mastodon, gnu social, pleroma, ActivityPub server, etc. But in the future, it could be that the underlying mechanisms could be made much easier and cheaper both to use and to switch/jump...and for the most part you only need to hold onto your own domain name...and can switch to different underlying mechanisms/technology/providers/whatever...but the top-level identity is preserved as you cross to other instances, etc. Within the indieweb community - a community that supports efforts like ActivityPub, etc. - owning your own domain is usually the first step...because it represents the formal establishment of YOUR identity. An identity that you control, and where your friends/followers can always know and follow. I imagine in the future if more people adopt the practice of obtaining and sticking to using ONLY their domain name as an identifier, much of this will be easier and some it simply a moot point.
I don't think that's true for all users, and maybe not even most. I'm not even sure that the people for whom it is true are key to other people's desire to use social media.
OTOH, persistence is key to social media where transssctionality is key to email, so losing a social media handle has a bigger impact on a social media user per se than does losing an email addresses to an email user.
No. That's true only for some users. Also tools like Mastodon are implementing multiple accounts / account migration.
Then why did you write this sentence and not "ActivityPub is like email"?
Mastodon would be like Hotmail, right?