Why does decentralization matter? | Hacker News Reader

Why does decentralization matter?

blog.joinmastodon.org

57 pointsdaveid15 comments

I use mastodon and like it. Other than HN (which I also count as a "social platform"), it's the only social platform I use. It is also decentralized. However, I have not found that it works particularly well as a decentralized social platform. 100% of the people I follow and the people who follow me are on the mastodon instance I'm on. I've actually made efforts to branch out, but I find it impossible. The network effect means that the whole of the external feed is full of stuff I'm completely uninterested in and there are no tools (that I know of) to whittle it down. For me this is a significant hurdle that stands in the way of them realizing their goals.

> It is also decentralized.

I guess this is subjective, but I don't really consider Mastodon to be (very) decentralised; it's federated, like email. Your account exists on only a single node—with that account you are free to communicate with any node, but you still have a single host/entity maintaining your identity.

If you want an example of a working decentralised social platform, have a look at https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

> However, I have not found that it works particularly well as a decentralized social platform. 100% of the people I follow and the people who follow me are on the mastodon instance I'm on

While I like the idea of proper decentralisation, I don't really see the problem with what you describe. Mastodon seems like a success even if every user only follows other users on their own instance. The point is that it is potentially possible for you to migrate to another provider and still follow the same friend list—vendor lock-in isn't possible. Just like email.

This isn't perfect of course—we almost had this with Facebook and GoogleChat but they both gained such a critical mass of users that they could shutoff XMPP support without user backlash, and Gmail also maintains a similarly locked-in status even while supporting federated standards (IMAP/SMTP) simply by making that support, and migration, needlessly complex.

This is why decentralisation matters. Federation is still pretty cool though.

I would consider scuttlebutt to be federated as well, since it’s difficult to communicate to other users without a pub server

Scuttlebutt's pubs are only dumb caching pipes, whereas a Mastodon server is actually the source of your content. That's the fundamental difference between the two.

As every Scuttlebutt node is equal to every other node, that makes it a distributed, rather than merely decentralized, protocol.

It's difficult right now, but the clients are very much under development—DHT is being worked on in Manyverse for example.

The important thing is that the protocols are not designed to be reliant on pubs in the long run.

A big step would be if the client could browse and search the public timelines on other instances. According to this issue:

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1053

...there are no plans to support that in the official web client, but there is an Android client that can do it. Maybe this will land in other clients eventually. If not, I may just write it myself.

Completely agreed, I just looked for this yesterday.

It seems like there's nothing hindering clients, just that the official Mastodon client devs don't have the time. I consider this an important feature as well that should be part of the standard set.

Sounds like a doable piece of work for a motivated programmer. I looked at the code base the other day out of curiosity. I found that it was quite nice on first glance. It wouldn't take that long to get into for an experienced Rails dev (which I pretend to be)... who knows...

Another significant hurdle I've seen is how hard it is to get external content into your feed - I want to consume content, from RSS feeds and multitude of other sources, not create content.

That's not quite what Mastodon is for, but there are many bots publishing RSS feeds, many of which can be found on botsin.space.

Well, given that most people don't have content creators in their social circles it sounds rather short-sighted if Mastodon intentionally lacks methods to bring content (creators) to the platform.

It's not short-sighted since it's not its intent to be an RSS reader.

I also wouldn't call it short-sighted that Mastodon lacks embedded racing games :-)

I think it's a nice idea to have RSS feeds available on Mastodon, but without changing the technical basis quite a bit (I think), this won't happen without Bots as proxies.

Why not just use an RSS reader?

Because it lacks the social part

Decentralization makes it harder to stop political or state actors from manipulating social media, anonymously and invisibly. It makes it harder to stop the propagation of toxic and inflammatory messages.

I don't say "impossible" because the state can shut down the Internet or illegalize decentralized software.

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