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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

If you apply the "Mastodon is Twitter" model, then this story makes Mastodon look like garbage.

If you apply the "Mastodon instance is a Subreddit" model, it makes a lot more sense.

You can start to see why Mastodon views more decentralized moderation as part of the creation process, and that's important. At the same time, the concept can't really exist in the user experience on Twitter, by design.

Still, there's much more to it than even that...

It's such early days with new social media that IMO the specific mental models people apply will make a huge difference in how they interpret the experience that unrolls before them...and when their interpretation of a discouraging event based on a broad model goes viral, it raises a ton of dust in the form of fears / doubts.

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>If you apply the "Mastodon instance is a Subreddit" model, this makes more sense.

Shouldn't this mean a ban on one instance allows you to still access other instances? That was not the case here. Even moving the account was not permitted after the ban.

You can still sign up on any other instance.

OP was even permitted to migrate their followers and setup a redirect after reaching out to the mods.

Your not entitled to free hosting by an instance, if they object to your content or actions they will ban you.

>redirect after reaching out to the mods

That's the thing I find noteworthy about the incident. I guess it's a disagreement with the definition of "decentralized." I suppose the mods were kind enough to allow it after appeal, but I don't see why they should be involved in the decision. I would expect it to be the minimum functionality to remain.

Mastodon isn't decentralized, it is a federated system just like email or the public switched telephone network.

Go use Briar if you want a fully decentralized social network.

> Mastodon isn't decentralized

The title for the official site (https://joinmastodon.org/) states:

"Mastodon - Decentralized social media"

Also, I was using the root commenter's terminology, not my own interpretation. I would lean more towards your definition. It seems nobody can agree...

You can run Mastodon in a decentralized manner (everyone running their own instance), but most users do not want the drawbacks of such a setup, hence the current Fediverse having nearly all users on multi-user instances of Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.

Sure, those are federated, but unless your running your own server ala Brier then it's not decentralized.

Most people do not need full decentralization though, a trusted instance run by a competent administration is sufficient. Burning battery and data to run a server on a mobile device is not optimal.

yeah, the instances should not hold the identity, that should belong to the user.

Meaningful distributed identity is an unsolved problem. Not everyone can be @name, nor do people want to use UUIDs or similar non-descriptive identifiers to avoid name collisions.

Paying for ongoing identity services is a nonstarter for most individuals.

You mean it's not a perfectly solved problem, which is true.

But there ARE solutions that don't involve allowing someone else to be able to hold your identity hostage.

Mods tried to force a bribe before. It’s very anarchic with little recourse

> Shouldn't this mean a ban on one instance allows you to still access other instances?

Not on the instance that's your "account provider" so to speak. (the obvious difference with reddit is that reddit.com as central "provider" for accounts exists)

> Even moving the account was not permitted after the ban.

According to the thread, the admin re-enabled the account so they could move.

> If you apply the "Mastodon instance is a Subreddit" model, it makes a lot more sense.

Doesn't that model fail because Mastodon presents a view that everyone is connected to everyone else? Can you not cross-instance reply to people's posts? That kind of fails the subreddit model.

It seems like a mailing list is still the more decentralized form of decentralized social media.

Nobody can stop you from using the same email address (ie identity) on a different mailing list.

I remember there being an attempt to make implement chat using the IMAP protocol. I'm blanking on the name of it.

> Nobody can stop you from using the same email address (ie identity) on a different mailing list.

If you use an address under someone elses domain, they can. If you use your own domain, you can do that in the fediverse too - with the caveat that with email both range of offerings to do this without selfhosting and technical portability are better. (although the fediverse side of things hopefully will improve)

> I remember there being an attempt to make implement chat using the IMAP protocol.

Deltachat

> If you use an address under someone elses domain, they can.

I suppose that's true. Google can ban a gmail account that is inappropriate on a Google Groups list, or a university can ban a student's account that represents the university inappropriately. Those are narrow cases, though. It's not in the same ball park as a mod deciding to ban someone. An instance for just the account seems the best option, but I don't know the devs' intentions.

   > If you apply the "Mastodon instance is a Subreddit" model, it makes a lot more sense.

Subreddit is a synonym for echo chamber. Feels like we have more than enough of those.

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