Nitin PaiToday in The Print, I write about why I got onto #Mastodon and why I’m circumspect about the chances of its success.
The migration of influencers “sends a signal to the people running Twitter that influencers can move out – perhaps completely – if the company doesn’t play fair. Mastodon has already begun to enjoy network effects and FOMO that will attract, initially at least, a higher quality user base. If Twitter chooses to ignore the signal, then Mastodon will more likely take off.”
Julien Deswaef@nitin Can you explain why you think the federated structure of Mastodon makes it more vulnerable to government control and cyberattacks?
@xuv Physical location of the servers.
@nitin Still not sure what you mean here. Sure some servers will be badly physically protected and in a juridiction that allows government control over them, but because of the federation, that will not be the case for all of them.
@xuv Not for all. But users on that instance will be vulnerable. Of course, they can sign onto another instance, but that involves rebuilding their profile
@nitin The cost of moving from one instance to another is diminishing every day. Since Mastodon 3.0, you can now move with all your followers. Though your posts stay where you posted them.
@nitin And I'm not advocating for all to be on the most secure instances. It depends on your threat model. I also believe that the more there will be instances, the better it is against cyberattacks and censorship. It's probably costly to do those two things (gain access and censor). So the more spread out we are, the best it is for all of us. They can't hack us all.
Sandip Bhattacharya ☮️@sandipb @nitin You can export your followers and following list. There is now a mechanism to transfer followers between instances that run Mastodon v3. You can import your following list too.
There is a way to request your full archive of post. But you can't import it somewhere else. At least, at this point.
There is a way to request your full archive of post. But you can't import it somewhere else. At least, at this point.