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 I think you can export your account data right? Maybe that includes contacts? It's early days and I suspect this is one of the issues they intend to address. My instance admin seems to love his role so that bodes well - I guess for some users it might be important to try a few out to see if they have confidence in one. Also it's important to support admins financially if they need it - the price we pay to not be advertised at :grin:
@chris Exporting is limited to exporting followings, not followers (which would need some kind of cryptographic protection to prevent the ability to import followers to multiple accounts).
I prefer systems (political as well as technological) that don't rely on the benevolence of the admins by having checks and balances. (Like decentralised servers as well as accounts.)
@fxneumann so with politics you don't like the civil service? There has to be some ultimate person manages things - even 'decentralised servers' still have owners and admins. You can set up your own not for profit org with a detailed ethical code of practice and funding stream and start your own instance that suits your values if you care so much. That's the beauty of mastodon really, sure some people might lose their instance but eventually stable long term ones will emerge
@chris I don't think there's still a need for an ultimate authority. Blockchain technology is an example of separating important data from the servers processing it without a single instance with supreme authority.
@chris Yes, but you can improve portability to mitigate the reliance on just one server admin. At the moment, the server admin of my Mastodon instance is a single point of failure.
And yes, Bitcoins can be lost irretrievably and wallets be hacked, but so can login data.
@fxneumann seems that your position is based on some assumption that mastodon won't evolve
@chris Exactly the opposite: My assumption is that Mastodon will evolve, and that's why I write about were I see the need for change.
@fxneumann It's not like these aren't know issues
@chris Even better!
@fxneumann just as thousands of bitcoins have gone missing/lost forever from servers and wallets being corrupted or hacked then you'd have the same problems with user data not being secure. Even a block chain solution would still be dependent on servers, ISPs etc. The infrastructure or the web is never going to be some autonomous thing, it has owners and operators