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Mastodon Is the Good One
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Technology
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There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don't want to talk to anybody else.
If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can't move to another server. You can't communicate with other servers that got defederated. Exactly the same as Facebook and Twitter. It's only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn't, which already has happened numerous times in the past. The whole thing is basically just based around wishful thinking. If everybody would be niche to each other and servers would run forever, it would be totally fine, but that's not how the world works.
Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes. The saving grace with email is that you don't have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don't like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.
But you can move to another server, you just can't take old posts with you
You can always move to another server. That's just the Web. As said, don't like Twitter? Move to Facebook. You don't need federation for that. Having to leave everything behind is the fundamental problem that federation fails to address.
Dumb analogy.
I can move to another Mastodon instance, and keep following the same accounts.
You can't. What you can and can't follow is determined by whatever the server federates with, which is not under your control. Also you lose all your followers and in case of server shutdown all the accounts on that server stop existing, so you can't follow them either.
Federation is a brittle framework that starts collapsing the moment anybody tries to use it seriously.