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by stormbrew 1314 days ago
> Mastodon is supposed to be better than those, right?

Here are the ways mastodon is better than twitter:

- It can't be bought by a billionaire man baby

- It can't be coerced into hosting awful people because they drive revenue

- It doesn't require advertising in order to continue existing

- Because of that I'm not being endlessly datamined by adtech every moment I'm using it.

- It can't die because one website goes down, and everyone on it doesn't experience awful performance just because one instance is falling over.

- If I don't like the admins of the instance I'm on, I can move to another instance and bring much of my data with me without having to exfiltrate it with tools that violate the TOS.

- I can use whatever clients I like with it and I never have to worry about the company deciding it doesn't like third party apps and killing them slowly with api rate limits.

There are also a lot of ways it's worse than twitter, though they're mostly along the lines of "some of my friends aren't on it". Things don't have to be "better in every way" than other things to be "better for me (or you)". There are always tradeoffs.

Re. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and iMessage are all apps you run on your phone. And if you can read the messages on them from a website (as you can if you turn on a feature for imessage), then the admins of the service also have access to your messages.

Again, we're talking about a website here.

1 comments

> Re. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and iMessage are all apps you run on your phone. And if you can read the messages on them from a website (as you can if you turn on a feature for imessage), then the admins of the service also have access to your messages.

Not true. Web clients for Matrix are open source, and you can self host them if you are afraid of the default host trying to inject spyware to the page

I mean, the website admin in that case can still access your messages. It's just that the admin is you.
That's true. Though I guess that when my parent comment referred to "admin", the were referring to the admin for the homeserver (the one routing the messages), which is different from the one hosting of the web client.

This is why services like Matrix and Signal open source their client. Because for security minded people, securing the client is much easier than securing the server.