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Comment by distcs | Hacker News Reader

> Its decentralized nature makes some things a lot more difficult to pull off than its competitors.

Help me understand one thing about Mastodon. We choose a Mastodon server to create account. What is decentralized about it? Doesn't choosing a server make it effectively centralized? I choose mastodon.social. What is there to stop mastodon.social from a change of ownership that makes it fall in the hands of people who take user-hostile decisions?

I know we can create a new account on a new Mastodon server and move all the followers but that's about it. We can only move the followers. We cannot move our post history. So when I choose mastodon.social or any Mastodon server, am I not putting all my eggs in one basket again?

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You created your account with mastodon.social. My mastodon account is with techhub.social. So your eggs are in that basket, but my eggs are in a different basket and others' eggs are in yet more baskets. You can argue that all of your own eggs are in one basket, but not everybody's eggs are in that one basket.

Some narcissistic infantile billionaire could buy out mastodon.social and burn it to the ground, but the rest of the Mastodon network moves on. You'd have to relocate, which is a pain, but you're not relocating at the same time the rest of the world is relocating. Decentralization is resilient, not bulletproof.

> Doesn't it make it effectively centralized?

The word you are looking for is federated. Different Mastodon servers comprise a so-called federation, so servers belonging to it can exchange data between each other. There are many federated protocols, for example, email and xmpp are federated. Some server owners choose to not be part of federation, or refuse to connect to some specific servers in a federation. That's what happened to Gab a few years ago.

The word federated makes total sense. Thanks! The word decentralized was written by the author of the OP, not by me and that's why I needed to ask the folks here if Mastodon is really decentralized. Your comment clarifies it for me. So thank you!

Mastodon is part of the Fediverse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

Maybe a little sticky, but decentralization doesn't discount that there are nodes, or points where things gather. In fact, decentralization, as I've always understood it (coming from anarchism background), is that there is no central node to which all others are beholden. Rather, there are centers (plural). So....

At the level of instances (plural), no one is central. The network is decentralized, containing multiple centers, all (most) of which are connected through federation (the word "affiliation" is not too far off either). And, while yes, any one instance could be considered a "center" and thus maybe considered to be centralized, it really isn't. Decentralization is less about a single specific object or node, and more about how said objects interact and relate.

Side note: I think when it comes to convos around decentralized networks, there really needs to be more investment in how they differ from distributed networks. In that difference is a ton of insight about how systems function, etc, imo. Personally, I'm much more interested in distributed networks.

I like how Jay Graber (who is now CEO at Bluesky) formulated it in old blog post:

>Calling a network “decentralized” only defines it by what it is not — it is not dependent on a single set of servers run by one company. What it actually is can look like many different things. Federated and peer-to-peer (p2p) protocols are different approaches to designing networks that structurally empower users.

https://medium.com/decentralized-web/decentralized-social-ne...

Yes. Also whoever runs the server can read your DMs.

This is also true of big social networks however those companies usually have access controls that prevent employees from accessing private data. Some random mastodon server isn’t going to have that.

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. I'm not familiar with Mastodon's architecture but I highly doubt DMs have E2E encryption—so the server maintainers must be able to get to DMs.

Correct me if @serverholic is wrong here.

We maintain a free messaging server for many years and believe me, there are far more important and interesting things to do for a server operator than looking at some random user DMs. It is simply not interesting.

So the answer is yes, the server operators can look at our random DMs. You may not be interested in looking at them but some other server operator might. So it is a good thing to know this beforehand to know what we are getting into.

Not sure if you're serious, or if this is some attempt at satire?

If it's the former: Okay, it's great that you don't feel the temptation to spy on your users, but even the most basic understanding of human nature should tell you that this doesn't generalize to all (or even most) people and organizations that would run a messaging server, free or not.

I'm serious and I also know many operators of public servers. Unless you are somebody important/person of interest for various three letter agencies, no one cares for your messages. If you are such person, just run your own server and use e2ee. Other than that, enjoy the convenience and easy message syncing and server side search the unencrypted messaging brings.

yikes. OK, then I'm definitely never using Mastodon. At least at Twitter and Facebook the employees have a strong incentive to not breach my privacy expectations other than me not being "interesting".

That was precisely the same with every single forum or email server since the beginning of time. And you know what, the capability to log in from anywhere and read your messages trumps privacy concernts for 99% of users. For the rest there are ways to exchange information without risk of it being accessed by third party.

DMs do not have e2e encryption. Don’t use it for non-public things.

I downvoted the parent, because they are missing the point of a public social network. It was never the goal of Mastodon to provide a place for private communication. Use Matrix for that.

Mastodon is for speaking publicly.

A direct message is implied to have a certain level of privacy. By definition they are not public.

Mastodon should at least have some way of indicating that the server owners can read their messages.

> We cannot move our post history.

At the moment. There's good reasons why not[1] but those can be worked around if people come to consensus[2].

[1] Because it's a push system, you'd have to re-push all those posts from the new account and that's not even necessarily the same set of people they were pushed to in the first place, etc.

[2] e.g the re-pushing can be obviated by having servers rewrite their local copies of statuses to the new account ID on receipt of an "A is now B" message. Obviously you'd need to make this unspoofable, etc., but the theory seems sound.

my mastodon account is less than 48 hours old, so i am not the best person to answer this. i will say this much, though: anything i write that i feel has value will always go onto a site that i control. currently, that's my blog with my name on it. if i'm forced to move to a new mastodon instance, i won't lose much.

You should consider linking to your Mastodon profile in your blog. I didn't see it in that post, or in your "About" page.

my mastodon link is on the front page of my site. i decided not to put it in the article because i want to emphasize the phenomenon rather than my own small place in it. and who knows, maybe i’ll move soon, just to demonstrate for myself that it is possible.

several hours later: yep, i did, in fact, just move my account! it wasn’t exactly easy. not something i would expect a novice to be able to do by themselves. but anyone who is reasonably technical can do it.

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