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by paulryanrogers 629 days ago
Mastodon means you can at least pick your boss, be your own boss, and take your identity and followers to a new boss. (Possibly even taking your content too, though maybe not links)
2 comments

Picking a ‘boss’ in a system where the average ‘employee’ has no credible way of assessing or evaluating them, or their superiors, and zero prospects of ever getting a face to face meeting with, is effectively no different to having the boss picked by an anonymous shareholder meeting in SF.

If all of the potential bosses have roughly the same degree of accessibility… which is the case for Mastodon for anything over a few hundred users.

What's stopping you from messaging server owners or stalking their profile to see they're ideologically compatible?
That's a lot more effort than using Discord and getting on with my life.
Compared to closed gardens like Discord and Xitter, Mastodon is a significant improvement.
But not in terms of the ‘choosing a boss’ aspect for the median user.
Did they ever address the problem of migration from a bad server?

For example, a scenario where your server dies and does not return. Or a malicious actor takes over and bans the user base. Or a honeypot encouraging user account migration, followed by bans.

In all 3 cases, you are effectively screwed the moment you migrate to a malicious server, or your server becomes malicious.

I remember blue sky trying to address this by tying your identity to a DNS record or something, but it's a severe limitation in anything trying to be decentralized