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Comment by cassianoleal | Hacker News Reader

So, they want to create Mastodon?

Mastodon is worse than twitter. You need to either maintain or join a server that is often managed by tyrannical admins that are even more trigger happy on silencing individuals and even other servers. You, your post history and account identity are at the mercy of those server administrators who can basically lock you out.

IMO credentials and identity management must be self hosted mobile and preferably not dependent on server hubs.

I dont use mastodon, I use forums, but you just have to look until you find a good place and dont think you own your "avatar" or posts or anything. I have left few forums when they started to feel wrong and I have no problem with that.

Turns out twitter's not so bad at managing a few million users after all

You mean administration is decentralized? Sounds like what they were going for.

> You mean administration is decentralized?

(not OP) Not really. Accounts are linked to one single instance, and if the admin of that instance decides to ban you, the other instances can’t do anything about it. It’s not one decentralized administration but a lot of smaller centralized administrations.

> a lot of smaller centralized administrations

Isn't that how decentralisation works?

> Isn't that how decentralisation works?

If there’s no synchronization between these administrations I fail to see how this has anything to do with decentralisation. It doesn’t remove the centralization, it just reduces its scope.

Why would other instances have any say over it? Like what you're describing is the purpose of decentralization. What you want is one large centralized administration that can dictate what each smaller instance can do. You're basically describing Reddit at that point.

It's like claiming IRC isn't decentralized because the mods in a channel can kick people out for spam or whatever.

> What you want is one large centralized administration that can dictate what each smaller instance can do.

Not at all. I want some administration that’s shared between instances. If you take a SQL database and split it into one instance per table, is that "decentralization"? I would rather think that decentralization is adding more nodes to the same database, such as no data is lost if a node is down.

Mastodon is like this: instead of sharing all the messages on all instances, you have multiple independant instances that may or may not mirror the messages of other instances. If one server goes down, all the content that wasn’t mirrored is lost and all the user accounts are lost.

Okay, but the end result of your decentralization is exactly what Mastodon is. Which is in order to be truly decentralized instances should have the option to opt into one or more shared administrations. But functionally that ends up being the same thing as what you complain about which is that ultimately administration and/or accounts are localized at certain administration levels. 'Instances' in Mastodon are that administration you want.

If you try and force a shared administration and say 'This is the central administration that you register on and instances share' then you no longer have a decentralized social network. You have Reddit.

> If you try and force a shared administration and say 'This is the central administration that you register on and instances share' then you no longer have a decentralized social network.

I was thinking of something based on concensus (see also how blockchains work) but I don’t know of any social network that work like this and I don’t know if it’s feasible.

Well, „Mastodon with a billion users“ probably. That would be nice.

Probably.

Mastodon is lacking marketing, big names, etc.

Could be that their solution isn't different from Mastodon in a technical way, but still is more successful.

what a horrible name

It's an odd choice, I agree. It just doesn't sound like something that is going to succeed as a social media. This is 100% subjective and exclusively based on a feel.

Edit, PS: I'd be glad to be proven wrong here. It's a great project!

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