[SamBorick]

I think there's an axiomatic difference here.

I don't believe any large service is more stable in the long term than a small one. To put it morbidly, all will be dust eventually. At least mastodon has account migration baked in.

Additionally, why would I want all my content to last forever? If I want something to last forever I'll carve it on a rock, not toot it.

Pretty much everything else you listed is a positive.

[fleddr]

There's quite a lot of wiggle room between short term volatility and a concept like "forever". If you take it as far as "we'll all die anyway", you might as well not post anything, ever, anywhere.

Large central services give reasonable stability as to not easily shut down altogether, having your account and all content removed. On Mastodon, this is a constant threat.

[kixiQu]

> Large central services give reasonable stability as to not easily shut down altogether, having your account and all content removed. On Mastodon, this is a constant threat.

I'd be interested to see the halflife of centralized services generally to be able to tease out the patterns in a way less vulnerable to survivorship bias. I recognize that invoking Google's product shutdowns is like the free space on the HN comment bingo card, but... You could also point to the cases where Google shuts down someone's entire business or life on the internet for opaque reasons, without the user having any meaningful recourse, as a "constant threat" of a system that's scaled beyond the human.

This conversation was just very, very different before the move feature. When mastodon.technology announced it needed to shut down (https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/), yes, the users learned they would lose their little chunk of namespace – old URLs would break, old content would need to be downloaded to archive – but the crucial thing is the social graph, and the move feature lets you pick up and move your followers. This is like if I could reach into the contacts files of everyone who had my email and update it. This means that "having [my] account and all content removed" is just a lot less big of a deal than when e.g. Facebook nukes someone's account.

[fleddr]

You have a point. The central services we consider stable are the winners, against a backdrop of many losers. We all flocked into a small set of winning services.

And the thing these winners have in common is that they are enormous. They require huge revenue streams (from ads) to be able to afford the enormous investments in scaling, moderation, compliance, etc.

The idea that a billion of us can keep dumping fresh content into our account for free and that none of this content seems to be ever lost, is honestly quite bizarre even if we take it for granted.

But that's the service level billions of people are used to. And it can only be delivered by these giants.