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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

So I agree with you that they should work like email -- but I've always said that Mastodon is better because it is like email; aka the power is in the nodes.

What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? Genuinely curious because I also am super skeptical that ATProto brings anything that we really need.

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The problem with centralized social media is that the admins have power over you. They can ban your account with no recourse, censor some of your posts (or some posts you want to read), or even post something from your own account that you don't approve of.

Mastodon doesn't change this, it just changes who the admins are. It lets a person under the jurisdiction of admin A interact with a person under the jurisdiction of admin B, which is better than fully-centralized X, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Your instance admin can still ban you with no recourse (account migration is incomplete, requires cooperation on both sides, and mostly exists to shut up Activitypub opponents who point these problems out). They're still just as (if not vulnerable) to government pressure as centralized social media, and considering that a single lawsuit could probably bankrupt most instances, I suspect they'd fold very very quickly. They can (and very often do) defederate from instances that post "too much nazi content", and if you disagree with the decision, there's again no recourse (you can migrate, but you won't get your lost relationships back).

A lot of us are our own instance admins, with our own accounts being the only accounts associated with our domains. I don't self-host though; I pay a dedicated hosting provider to handle this for me. This means I end up having a very similar relationship to my Mastodon provider as to my email- and cloud storage providers.

> They can (and very often do) defederate from instances that post "too much nazi content", and if you disagree with the decision, there's again no recourse (you can migrate, but you won't get your lost relationships back).

Worse, they defederate instances that don't also defederate instances that they dislike badly enough so you can't even have neutral instances where you can communicate with everyone.

Yes, very good point sure. I (as a Black not-right-wing person) have huge problems with the whole "The Bad Place" thing (long story short, Black folks that I generally agree with politically are absolutely horribly ban-heavy and way too power-trippy on moderation.)

Is there any other way to deal with spammers that can't be applied to non-spammers by a malicious admin?

> What do you think is wrong about Mastodon?

The same problems as always. Allow federation and you get...

- federation wars and moderators conducting these wars using their own users as hostages - I left Mastodon years ago when some particularly dumb morons decided to do bitchfights regarding Israel / Palestine. No I'm not interested in your pointless squabble, but I do care when I suddenly don't see posts from a bunch of users without even getting a notification...

- Mastodon-specific, when you move your account from one instance to another (e.g. as response to above-mentioned BS) your followings and followers migrate - but all your posts and media do not

- spam, trolls and griefers abusing the system, up to and including sending around CSAM material that inevitably gets sucked in by your instance, making you liable in the eyes of the law

- security issues. Mastodon has been full of these, no thanks I don't have the time to be constantly on guard lest I be exploited from above-mentioned griefers.

- other instances not giving a flying fuck about moderation or abuse going out from their instances.

Sounds like you want to run your own private instance. That way you control your own moderation and federation policies

I think the problem is that it's too onerous to run your own instance, but being on anything but the "default" instance means dealing with volunteer moderators imposing their worldview on the available discourse.

Creating a Mastodon account shouldn't mean supporting the particular political affiliation of the moderators, but I think it feels that way for many of the instances.

And then you are also on the hook to be a sysadmin (including all the legal aspects thereof). That's generally a bit much to ask of someone who just wants to chat with their friends online.

> Sounds like you want to run your own private instance.

I'd like to do so, yes, but that exposes me to a (not insignificant) financial cost, (especially in Germany) a significant legal risk from CSAM/DMCA et al., and a significant amount of effort in maintenance.

Sure, there are "Mastodon as a service" providers that take at least the legal risk and maintenance off of me, but again, these cost even more money, and now I have the risk that the hoster is a fly-by-night operation that one day decides to close up shop for whatever reason.

And if anything happens to that private instance (say, the hoster disappears, the machine disappears without a backup, or the hoster undergoes an orderly shutdown), in the best case I still may have enough preparation to migrate the followers, but the old content is lost in any case. And that is bad.

In contrast with Bluesky and to a lesser degree Twitter, I can at least be reasonably sure that the provider does not vanish over night.

ActivityPub supports a less compelling user experience for many people: you only have a partial view of the network (you won’t see all the replies to the posts of people you follow on other servers), no global search, etc

Technically the internet also doesn't have "global search" but people are able to get along just fine most of the time.

This is how offline social networks work, and it might be fundamentally the only way social networks end up working. If each instance can't filter what it receives, then spam is too easy. If every message is globally flooded, the system scales as O(N^2) and is easily vulnerable to DoS.

AT solves these problems. Even if AT turns out to be a bust, they have an excellent architecture.

AT works by the use of global relays which see everything.

Sure, but it shows global replies, it provides global search, it's not O(n^2), it's not easily DOSed, and it's highly amenable to spam filtering, which are the issues you raised.

It's true that this solution doesn't work for private posts and DMs, but the n in O(n^2) is much smaller there, so I don't think it's as much of an issue for personal data servers to communicate directly in those cases.

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