[_heimdall]

Distribution alone doesn't make a system resilient. A distributed system can help with resilience for anything related to network or hardware failure, but even then you need to make sure the different resources don't have a hard dependency on each other.

If you want a resilient system redundancy and automatic failover systems are really important, along with solid error handling.

Think about a distributed data store for example. You may spread all your data across multiple distributed areas, but if each area is managing a shard of data and they aren't replications then you still lose functionality when any one region goes down. If you instead have a copy complete copy of data in each region, and a system to automatically switch regions if the primary goes down, your system is much more resilient to outages (though also more complex and expensive).

[Timshel]

It does not garanty resiliency but it does increase it.

If tomorow mastodon.social disappear the network might lose 80% of it's content but recovery could be possible even if the server never come back.

[_heimdall]

My point was just that resilience still depends on how a system is distributed and what else is done.

Distribution alone doesn't really make a difference, though pairing it was redundancy and failovers is going to get pretty far.

The case of mastodon.social is really a question of whether the value there is the network and protocol itself or the user created content posted there. If its the user content, the value is lost when the one host goes away. If the value is the network and protocol then yes, the value of the network is still there even though the data is gone. It does raise an interesting question of whether Mastodon is really considered distributed or not, the network is and hosts are using a shared protocol but the data isn't really distributed.

[Timshel]

Yes there is the question of network vs data :). And as you mention while some data end-up being distributed with Activity Pub the protocol is not made to allow restoration.

One point I find interesting too is that distributed network often allows more agency to external actors. For example if you believe that the resiliency of the mastodon.social instance is not enough for you then you can decide to host you own server with your preferred criteria.

[_heimdall]

That's really where ActivityPub starts to rub me the wrong way. Server admins really need moderation power since everything is hosted on their hardware, but it also is a poison pill for decentralization.

I can host my own server and make my own rules, but every other admin can just ban my instance.

[lxgr]

I feel like that's actually a counterexample. At least most people with mastodon.social as their home server will probably not have a backup of their followed/following graph and never be able to recover.