on the internet, individual nodes can go down and that's okay. the network will typically re-route around those automatically, and it's one of the thing's greatest strengths
on mastodon, individual nodes will block or suspend random-ass people / other instances, and the only thing you can do about it is pack up your whole fuckin life and move elsewhere, until another dipshit repeats it there / with another instance you're on, if you can even find a single instance that isn't part of this tangled network of arbitrary blocks/suspends (spoiler: you can't)
as much shit as i give bluesky and people who moved there, i sure as hell can't recommend mastodon or "the fediverse". sorry, a single government drone joined internet.farts, we're shutting that whole thing down for you. you had friends there? too bad. moderation is hard so we're outsourcing all of our instance admin to dramawarehou.se. you mean that might have been a bad actor all along? sacre bleu
absolute fucking joke
✨ This was pretty much our entire experience with Mastodon. It's actually the same set of conceptual errors that makes NFT and memestock communities so philosophically insufferable, this idea that 'decentralization' necessarily leads to greater transparency and accountability, when there's absolutely no evidence, anywhere in the history of online communities, that this has ever been the case.
Instead, you end up with a community that's traded the benefits of centralization(stability, ease of access, oversight)... for a set of benefits that are only beneficial to bad faith actors(block-evasion becomes trivially easy just by swapping instances and nobody checks, doxxing and harassment is rampant because there's no consistent TOS across instances), while retaining all the flaws of centralization and also adding a whole bunch of new ones entirely unique to its cell-based structure. The idea is that you get to 'shop around' for your preferred ruleset, and that there's no larger authoritative overlord dictating how the platform gets used. But the issue is that it's only a decentralized network, not an actual flat democratic power structure. You don't get to vote on the rules, you're just choosing which fiat liege-lord you declare your allegiance to. Within individual network nodes, there's actually an extreme amount of centralization of power, with many servers relying on a single moderator as their only point-of-failure. Not only does this lead to terrifyingly low Bus Factors, it also means there's effectively no accountability that anyone can enforce if a moderator just goes mad with power. In actual reality, the decentralized nature makes concentration of authority into medieval posting fiefdoms comically simple and often unavoidable.
Within the node itself, the admin has absolute discretionary authority and can basically just dictate whatever the heck they want. Instance-blocking over inane personal grudges that end up catching normal users in the crossfire aren't just common, they're so common that advocates of decentralized platforms tout them, somehow, as a feature. "It's good, actually, that I have to back up my entire post history twice weekly just in case we enter a feud with an instance I have friends on so that I can be ready to migrate at a moment's notice. In fact, you're the one being naive if you didn't treat your social life like a doomsday prepper treats palettes of MREs." If something went wrong, it was Your Fault, and dozens upon dozens of True Believers will line up outside your digital doorstep to tell you exactly why.
And it's STILL infested with nazis, too! Again, block-evasion and instance-swapping are so hilariously simple to perform that the only people who end up punished are people acting in good faith. It's yet another instance of a high-concept tech solution attempting to be crowbarred in to solve a social problem, and then offloading all the responsibility onto the mechanism like that makes everything hunky-dory. 'Decentralized' becomes an everything-proof shield for evangelists to hide behind as to why this isn't all a terrible idea, because they don't perceive this as a conceptual failure. They can't have failed to build a functional system, individual nodes can only fail to live up to the Fediverse's potential, a potential that is in an eternal beta-state.
