Decentralisation on Mastodon is an illusion. For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios. When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody, this already puts me in a position where I depend on the people who own the server. This means that if for any reason these people don't like me, they can simply ban me and that's it. Basically the same caveat as with the corp social medias, but on a smaller scale. Mastodon is definitely an alternative to big corps, but it has the same flaws. I don't see it as a way the decentralised community should go.
> When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody
And that somebody can be you. There are Mastodon servers operated by individuals for their friends or their small company. Anyone can host a server with their own rules.
Though that will then open you up to legal liability, including for things that other people say (if their messages reach your server, even if you haven't personally seen them): https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html
Being a user on someone else's server is much less legal risk. Using E2E software where nobody runs a server is much less legal risk. Running a one-person instance of Mastodon is the worst case for legal liability.
Even if you do that, you're still - legally speaking - liable for hosting all those federated messages.
IANAL, but my understanding is the most effective way to run your own server is to have it completely hidden, e.g. behind classic HTTP authentication so that nobody but you can even see it's a Mastodon server, and definitely can't see anything the server is ingesting, without first logging in.
Even then, if you're a resident of California, your server "collects and maintains personally identifiable information from a consumer residing in California who uses or visits" so you need a privacy policy for yourself, legally speaking. See how much work it is to be legally compliant with laws that never really considered your use-case but apply to you anyway?
> liable for hosting all those federated messages.
Mastodon do not permanently stores these messages. They are cached, and evicted after some time. I linked to a video some time ago, and now that link is unreachable because it's expired.
The URL contained "/cache/", and I didn't understand what it meant until my video died.
That's true, but while they're cached, if someone else could see them, they're hosted, and you're liable for hosting them.
I understand that Mastodon has a "local feed", and even if you're its sole user, if you don't block anonymous readers from access, that means someone could technically see a message by someone else that you're subscribed to, take umbrage at it, and sue you for making it available on your server, even temporarily.
From what I've seen of Mastodon, it does seem possible to block access to the server's local feed, but I don't know that for sure.
In addition to the local feed, there's also what you personally boost. I'm not sure how one strikes a balance, and if the software is still usable, if you were to hide the main URL for your feed (at least, the URL so that visitors from the web can read your feed on your server). Would it still be possible to participate in conversations, would people still be able to subscribe to you?
> Would it still be possible to participate in conversations, would people still be able to subscribe to you?
Yes. I follow several remote users who default to "unlisted" posts. (To be honest, I don't know if they're unlisted or follower-only posts -- I can't tell.)
Yes, I know this. But it feels overkilling to host a server which is capable of hosting thousands of users just for me alone. I'd like something small, dedicated just for my own usage. Kind of a way to have my RSS feed discoverable and commentable.
I run my own Mastodon instance and it's definitely heavy and unoptimized for this use case. That seems to be a common theme with Ruby on Rails applications, to be honest.
There are lighter clients that will integrate perfectly into Fediverse/Mastodon networks, though, such as GoToSocial (https://gotosocial.org/) with its light and low-tech UI.
Many Mastodon alternatives expose a Mastodon API so that you can use the standard Mastodon apps with them, even if you're not really hosting Mastodon itself.
Modern software deployment methods can fill the gap between your selfhosted need and the work to be done. I won't name technologies here, because existing have its flaws (docker, helm, etc).
Mastodon is federated and thus basically fulfills your whish. IMO "decentralized Web3" such as IPFS may rempve that need for classical "hosts" but at the costs of an entrance barrier for users (have to install that client).
There’s really nothing to stop you running your own server.
One of my impractical, but dream ideas was to create a Mastodon client that had a server embedded in it. No more ‘Signing up for a server’ by default you had your own instance
My understanding is that ActivityPub relies on the server having a stable domain name and be reachable from the internet so that other instances can talk to it. So your client must continuously run its server in the background (impossible on mobile) and be reachable from the internet at a static IP or dynamic DNS with low TTLs (very impractical on mobile unless you perpetually leave your "mobile" at home).
Though some downtime is usually handled by servers with "backoff retries" eventually you're server will be marked as offline and servers might never bother contacting it anymore.
Similar to email which - at least technically - has the idea built into its protocol that servers are going to be down.
But mastodon was built with more modern web in mind, so having a server that's offline more than online will be highly impractical.
I guess one could solve this with buffering proxies. Either hosted by others for you (as a service) defeating the entire premise of you being the full owner, or hosted on your nas or cheap hosting. Such a proxy would be far simpler than a full blown server, as all it needs to do is ingest messages and keep them for X time and forward them to your "actual server inside the client" once that connects online.
The server-in-the client can handle outgoing messages and handle downloading linked media and such.
I am not aware of such proxy software. But currently gotosocial is the simplest and lightest server software I am aware of, so maybe stripping that could work.
> I guess one could solve this with buffering proxies
That’s essentially Nostr. There the servers are untrusted relays and cryptography is used to enforce authenticity.
(One of the) issues with Mastodon is that it was initially designed for browser-based use and browsers require an origin (aka a domain or IP) to talk to, because originally there were no clients. Having actual clients would remove the need for this since they can talk any protocol to any host and implement their own logic to authenticate messages. I think Mastodon was just never expected to become this big.
I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse” if you’re curious, just search for my username and those keywords. Maybe one of these days I’ll write a blog post.
> I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse”
Same here. And I too, have planned such a blog post for a while now. Just not sure if it's worth criticizing something that's far from perfect but in many ways still better than many other systems. A bit like the vegan criticizing the vegetarian for not being animal-friendly enough (or worse, the carnivore criticizing my vegetarian diet for not being good enough because I wear a leather belt).
The issue with the current iteration of fedi is that it misses the main problems that average, non-technical people experience with social media, so those people remain unaware of fedi and/or can't get past the friction of using it, as a result they remain on the mainstream services, all while fedi remains a nerd echo-chamber with significant unsolved issues around funding, moderation, spam protection, etc (the only reason it doesn't collapse under spam/unsavory content is that it's mostly just not even worth spamming due to its irrelevance).
I'm not particularly sure the current iteration of fedi being around is better than other systems... it sucks the oxygen out of the room and reduces/fragments demand for an actually good replacement for FB/X/etc...
> For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios.
That sounds like Nostr. My understanding is your node is the nostr relay. Your nostr client can publish messages to your relay. Any "subscribed" clients or relays can then access and forward the message from your relay.
On the GoToSocial website it's clear what it is, how it works and how to get started. The Nostr website seems more like they want me to sign up and start using their server/relay. And I had to spend some time searching for how to set up a private relay. This fact is off-putting. Feels like they care more about their product than about free communication.
Nostr doesn't have "a website". nostr.com is its own thing, nostr.org is another thing and nostr.how is yet another. None of these (AFAIK) is related to the Nostr project, whose only web presence is on GitHub.
Yes. It's just larping as long as you are to use a username and a password to log in to a server - even if it's your own server. This is why I have never tried bluesky, their apps wants me to enter a user/pass and my date of birth. Nostr fixes this.
