| > The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint You’re, again, looking for a decentralized system. > Federation solves that by hosting your stuff on an always-on server somewhere, which you get to choose and should be able to trivially switch at any time without affecting your social graph or account name or who is blocked by anybody in any way Yes, the ability to change home servers is missing from mastodon. But even if they had such a feature, the content you see and likely your ability to change servers would be controlled by your instance owner because they literally own the machine your data lives on and which serves you content. This is the defining quality of a federated network vs a decentralized one. > Federation works when there are thousands of federated instances that integrate seamlessly with one another I don’t think this is a useful definition as it also fits decentralized systems. Federated networks are networks where independent instances of compatible software are able to exchange information without being owned by a single entity (think email, mastodon, lemmy, etc) |