The audacity of someone pushing through another centralized silo as an ethical social network! Their FAQ is quite infuriating: we know better, once we're bigger than Facebook we'll think about decentralization.
@Gargron On the other hand, establishing a monopoly and then benevolently giving it up by way of becoming decentralized is a fascinating strategy. Decentralization upfront misses out on low costs of switching from centralized competitors, which would allow for greater network building.
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@Gargron @bthall Relying on that promise is indeed the important part. Though there are legal ways to ensure they will keep their promise (if they wish to do so).
Not sure I agree with the other points though. While those qualities are the case with mastodons unique approach to decentralization I dont see them as inherent qualities of decentralization.
I would also say that the reduced cost argument isnt valid to mastodon or virtually any decentralized system. In fact due to additional overhead if anything the overall costs are increased. The difference is just that the cost are spread out between the servers so the burden isnt on any one person/group.
@freemo @Gargron This discussion has highlighted for me an interesting side thing to consider: the matter of de facto centralization amidst the use of systems that permit decentralization. To what degree is a decentralization-permitting system such as Mastodon better than those that do not permit decentralization if significant shares of the population using that system use only one host? At that point, the bucket's leaky, but it's still a bucket. & Maybe that's good?
@freemo @bthall You might as well assume I meant reduced-cost-for-the-individual.