[Nextgrid]

The list of reasons is good but the proposed alternatives in terms of social media (as opposed to messaging - which are pretty good) is laughable. Mastodon and all these federated services IMO fail to address the main problem while bringing several other problems to the table; I've explained this in a previous post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513) which I'll quote here:

> One big issue is that there’s nothing decentralised that currently exists that can rival the quality & user experience of mainstream social networks, and decentralisation comes with its own problems (I personally think the problem with mainstream social media is its ad-based business model and not centralisation). Mastodon (which seems to be the biggest alternative being proposed) is still a joke, even the name and branding sounds awful IMO. And who in their right mind thought calling a post a “toot” (https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/toot) was a good idea. Besides the branding, decentralisation comes with its own issues like the lack of network-wide content moderation and agreement on what content is acceptable. There are solutions (more like hacks) around this where instance admins can choose not to federate with instances they don’t like the policies of, but it then causes problems for end-users where they can’t communicate with their peers on those banned instances despite all of them being on Mastodon. Good luck explaining to a non-technical person why they can’t talk to/see the posts of certain people despite them all being on Mastodon, and the solution is to spend time choosing an instance with policies you agree with and making sure your friends are on it or on a similar instance that’s not banned by yours, and then hoping the instances stay online without any kind of funding (there’s also no knowledge of whether they would scale to the size of mainstream social networks). The solution IMO is not Mastodon or any of these fringe social networks. The main problem is the lack of an ethical business model in mainstream social media. The solution would be to vote with your wallets and fund a better Facebook alternative - it could even show the current social networks that there’s profit to be made treating their users with respect and make the situation better for everyone else too.

[dysproz]

I think that app does not make it successfull. App can be awful, because friends that use it with us are the real value of social media. So if you’ll convince most of your friends to use Mastodon, it may be pretty good social media app. You are right that non-technical people may find hard to use these ‘super secure alternatives’, but apparently media buzz about evil Facebook did the job and nowadays it’s not always obvious that someone is on Facebook. I have some friends that decided to use apps that are not really social media apps as substitute to Facebook - and it turns out that reddit or signal may be a great social media place even though it’s not really designed to be one. :-)

[1996]

The lack of censorship that you don't like is the main value proposition and what I like. Run your own server to match your own values, but don't impose them on others.