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Comment by tuukkao | Hacker News Reader

> Regular social media platforms like Facebook have a single point of failure. If their servers go down, your content goes down with it.

While I agree with the principle of this argument, I think it's far more likely that any of the publicly available Mastodon instances goes boom long before Twitter does. My different kinds of social media activities might be spread across the fediverse, but all of my toots are only on one point of failure, and technically in significantly more incompetent hands than on Twitter.

I'm not disagreeing with this article per se – I want decentralized social media to succeed as much as everyone else – but it's much too brittle and technically minded for the people I mostly like to hang out with, i.e. non-techies.

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> I think it's far more likely that any of the publicly available Mastodon instances goes boom long before Twitter does

as long as the admins give a heads-up, you can still move to another instance using the provided feature. If the instance spontaneously combusts, you're a bit out of luck, yes :(

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration

That is true, yes. But then there's the fact that my identity is tied to that instance. All of my followers would have to go through the trouble of refollowing me on another instance, and that is only if I'm able to tell them that the instance I'm currently on is about to go bye-bye.

IIRC you can move your account across instances and keep your followers, but the likelihood of that working successfully depends on the software running on your followers' instances.

For awhile now, the Mastodon account migration process has supported automatically updating your followers to point to your new account: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration

I stand corrected. I'd still rather have my own personal handle that I could point to any given Mastodon account (kind of like how email aliases work) but it's absolutely better than nothing.

Twitter used to be notorious for intermittent outages (the "fail whale"). They have long since fixed this.

That was temporary. I think the article means a host going dark permanently.

In fact, in support of decentralisation I've been wanting to move my account off of mastodon.social for a long time now, but have not found (or even know where to look - no, the instance picker doesn't give me enough information) an instance that gives me even the confidence of mastodon.social that it will remain around, which already is lower than twitter.com's.

(And ideally one that lets me maintain my own blocklist rather than doing that for me, but I'm already accepting that at mastodon.social, so that's not a deal-breaker.)

I'd guess that most instances with several thousand users will be around for quite some time. There are lists that show that.

Most instances have a public page you can check out to see the instance's vibe. EG https://mastodon.xyz/public , https://fosstodon.org/public

Once you've found a new instance, you can transfer your followers to it. This Feditips page tells how to move your 'mutes, blocks etc'.

https://mstdn.social/@feditips/105317854827203241

Remove that number at the end and there are a lot more Feditips. One tip: you can easily subscribe to any Mastodon account through an RSS reader ... add '.rss' to the account's public page, there's your feed!

Yeah I know how to move my account, I just don't know where to yet :) I don't really care about an instance's vibe, since I only check my follower timeline anyway. That said, only a user count (especially without knowing how many of those are actually active users) doesn't give me too much confidence; I'd like to know who's behind it, and how and why they're going to keep it online in the long term.

There are other decentralized social networks (mostly up and coming) that run on distributed networks that aren't as brittle.

For example, a network of nodes that balance all traffic rather than a network of independent servers that federate.

That looks nice. Let's get back to this once any of those services has reached the kind of maturity that a non-techie is willing to sign up and start building their network. I have no idea what needs to happen for that to become the reality, though.

> once any of those services has reached the kind of maturity that a non-techie is willing to sign up and start building their network

Has the fediverse reached that level of maturity?

A single distributed network is more like twitter, instagram, or telegram. A federated network necessitates teaching about home servers, blacklists, server outages, etc.

I've heard from people that work on Activity Pub though that they are moving towards making things function in a more distributed way (portable accounts for example). So things seem to be converging in that direction regardless.

So there's no way to move your data to another instance?

there is! see my sibling post to yours.

That's possible:

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

That doesn't move your data to another instance though. All Mastodon supports is - Putting a 'I have a new account' notice on your old account - Exporting your toots. They do not support importing toots, which means if the instance goes boom your old toots are, for all intents and purposes.

> all of my toots are only on one point of failure

I hadn't considered this before, but might this be an instance where a blockchain is actually useful? If you want to mitigate the brittleness of a single personal server hosting your toots, distribute/duplicate them across many personal servers? Then I guess we'd need to change our concept of "host" from "physical server" to "private/public key pair that enables encrypting toot history (so writes/edits/deletions) from an author and decrypting them for author+host subscribers".

Admittedly I'm a bit out of my depth here so maybe there's some reason this wouldn't work/would be a bad idea I'm not seeing at the moment (aside from the additional technical overhead).

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