this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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How is mastodon not just a bunch of centralized platforms?
Sure the servers communicate with each other but the content is still just on one of them. Goes the server, so goes the content.
Or am I mistaking?
If it is like I say I feel it is more trading Hitler in for, potentially, a bunch of smaller Hitlers.
This is what decentralized means. If your home instance goes to shit, you can just move your account to another one.
But you can't really? If I remember correctly you still lose all the posts, followers and pretty much everything that you would expect to keep.
Technically you keep your account but let's be honest, you don't in the sense people want.
Maybe my knowledge is dated but that is what I recall about moving accounts.
If something has hundreds of "centralised" platforms owned and run by a diversity of different people and spread all over the world geographically, then that's "decentralised".
I can't really think of another way in which something could be decentralised.
With ActivityPub, there's nothing stopping you hosting a server literally just for yourself. It wouldn't get much more decentralised than that.
I think the question arose from a scenario I was imaging in which a instance goes down and all or some of the content is lost.
Decentralization, I thought would be if all the content gets posted to one instance and then every other instance is just a mirror of that one. In other words, every Lemmy instance has all the content all the time.
IIRC the content is on multiple. If there's a single user on lemmy.world subscribing to content from somewhere.else's foo community, then foo will be synced to lemmy.world and if somewhere.else is taken down it will remain on lemmy.world.
But someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Also, it isn't just about servers going offline. If a single server does something bad, you can just switch to a different one and enjoy the same content you've been seeing.
Well, I am not a systems engineer to answer your question, in any case smaller Hitlers equals Hitlers with less power. Dividing power is not the definitive solution to authoritarianism, but it usually helps a lot, especially if the agents are also competitive. "If you are too Hitler, I'll go to this other server that is a little less so" is a valid incentive to avoid the Hitlerization of the admins.
I don't think I've ever used the name Hitler so much.