This post has content warnings for: "linux-brained" mousebold mastodon thoughts.
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in reply to @nouv's post:
Yeah I guess that's my one and only fundamental problem with it. Like, as bad as social media being a business is, at least businesses don't usually delete their servers hosting your data overnight for personal reasons. And hosting a server yourself? In 2023? Unless you're a capital-N Nerd, forget it. I just want to send and receive life status updates and jpegs of dragons to friends. That's too much.
Oh right the other point you make. Email started when colleges and the government were hosting all the servers, and you had good guarantees from them. The internet is so different these days. I honestly don't think any decentralized protocols will truly flourish the way email did ever again. At least not for anything Big, like social media.
i don't mean to get too weird about anything but something something "the delayed adoption of ipv6 and its consequences" something something "an ecosystem and structure that demands deference to corporation over community for fragile 'stability'"
What I never understand though is...cohost could just as easily shut down overnight for personal reasons. The only reason to think it won't is trust in the admins. And while I genuinely don't think that would happen (I think when they shut down they will have a transition period for everyone to move and do backups), the only reason to think it won't is trust, and I have that trust in my mastodon instance's admins. It's all a game of trust no matter where you go, look at how much of corporate Twitters current landscape is based on "Elon is mad for personal reasons". So I don't think this is unique to decentralized services at all. And I think inevitably all services will shut down and it's only a matter of how you trust your admins to handle it. Places like Reddit and Twitter ran for an unprecedented amount of time despite being unprofitable the whole time but that landscape of infinite free VC for social media is gone and we won't see a repeat of sites like that for a long time. Forums or social media sites going for several years then shutting down and people migrating was the norm and will be the norm again, so seeing a mastodon instance run for five years then close can't be seen as a failure, but I've seen people say that's why mastodon is bad. Those people are going to really struggle when the new internet landscape isn't even the big corporate sites going on for a decade or more anymore. It's all about how they handle closures that matter, deleting things overnight vs giving people ample notice and time. But again, that's true of every site out there, especially anything non corporate, which includes Cohost or Pillowfort or your favorite local message board. All you can do is find admins you personally trust, and sometimes you will be right and sometimes you will be wrong.
I'm not computer-savvy enough to speak to any technical hurdles but to my eye the main hurdles are the people with money emphatically do not want a decentralized service on the scale of e-mail to ever happen again, and have thoroughly conditioned the average user to also not want that, so it's effectively a non-starter. It's easy to joke about the older generations not knowing much about computers, but the younger generations have it just as bad, and this time that seems to be by design.
As far as I can tell, even e-mail has effectively been centralized by Google, with only a very small proportion of any e-mail traffic happening outside of their ecosystem (and I'm told it's kind of a pain in the ass, also).