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Comment by Santosh83 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this fundamentally a political issue? Even unbreakable encryption and stuff like shortwave broadcasts can be outlawed by a government which will lead to a very few number of holdouts on the run from law and the rest of society is going to comply.

True change can only happen if people passionate about this manage to convince the REST of the 95% to back them and adopt the ideals.

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There needs to be a bigger benefit to the end users before decentralized services catch on. Widespread hard censorship of company run services might be just the kind of thing that decentralization needs to stop being a niche thing for people willing to put up with a diminished experience for the nebulous benefit of controlling your data and experience. Vanishingly few people want to deal with running their own services so the annoyances of not having control over what exactly happens on $socialMediumPlatform is smaller than the hassle of trying to move to mastodon then having no one to follow.

We need Justin Bieber to use mastadon.

Is he even that hot of a celebrity any more? I was not in that demographic at all but he seems to have fallen into the weird void of the 'formerly super famous' to me.

Either way it's an old strategy for businesses, pay or convince a celebrity to use your platform to bring their fans along. You want a wider span of 'influencers' though for sure because you don't want Mastodon to become the place with all the Beiber fans.

Once decentralization becomes more widespread, it can impact politics too. Look at "liquid democracy" initiatives in South America for example.

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