I don't feel that comfortable with Mastodon's decentralised concept. While the servers are decentralised accounts are tied to one server.
Who's behind a server, how commited they are to continue their service: Nobody knows. (Except for mastodon.social itself.)
With server-specific accounts, one's in the hands of the admins: When they decide to stop, the accounts' accumulated social capital is gone.
I'd love to have accounts you can migrate from one server to another without losing connections.
@fxneumann if you're not comfortable, host your own or use a different platform?
@ajroach42 If that's the answer Mastodon's doomed from the beginning. With "host your own" you'll never reach significant numbers of people.
.@ajroach42 If self-hosting is the answer, Mastodon is doomed to fail from the beginning.
The problem of trust can never be solved but by systemic checks and balances. Among them should be an easy exit option allowing to switch instances without losing one's social ties.
@fxneumann exiting is easy. If you want people to follow you to your new instance, you have to let them know where that is.
There are a few thoughts on that front, and they are being experimented now. Automatically DMing your old followers is an option I've seen. Things may change, though. We're still young.
As for trust, if you don't want to self host, you'll likely need to wait for a more mature host to spring up. Someone that has an EULA and gauantees a minimum longevity.
@ajroach42 Technically exiting is easy. Socially, not so much the longer an account exists. Relying on contacts to manually switch is increasing the social cost of switching.
I read the discussion on this ticket – there are some great ideas in it: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177
@fxneumann I'll check it out.
@fxneumann you're in a minority of concerned people. To that concerned minority, I say host your own Or find a server you trust.
The platform is young (I mean, gnusocial isn't young, but this coat of paint is) and there will be hiccups. That's normal and natural.
Mastodon isn't twitter, no matter what the think pieces say. It's something weirder, less reliable, and way more interesting.