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Comment by Mattasher | Hacker News Reader

They aren't decentralized, they're federated. If you are on an "instance" of an alt-twitter (e.g. mastodon.social) you are 100% subject to the rules of that instance and your handle isn't portable, though you can generally share content across instances and interact with others.

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>you can generally share content across instances and interact with others.

Unless that person is on an instance the owner of your instance doesn't like.

Federation is a form of decentralization though? There's no central critical Mastodon server owned by some entity, anyone can make their own server. It's not like the only way to make something decentralized is to not have servers involved.

Your account is mostly (but not entirely) portable, and redirects works for handles so handle's can be portable as long as you pick and use a webfinger instance under your control or someone willing to redirect. It's nowhere near perfect and especially the ability to move accounts badly needs improvements, so I'm not suggesting it's good enough, but it's slowly heading in the right direction (the ability to move accounts - currently only with the cooperation of the original server - is fairly new)

There is already some basic functionality to alias handles, for example @shane@reustle.org points to my mastodon.social profile. They still need to add a bit better support until it works fully, though. For example, when I tag this alias handle, it gets replaced with the m…social domain. This would let you jump around instances without changing your handle.

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