@feditips

For the price of a blue check mark, you, too, can own an entire ̶T̶w̶i̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ Mastodon.

@feditips a nice overview by @thelinuxEXP

Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed: easily replace Twitter, Instagram and YouTube

https://tilvids.com/w/7ec57164-aef3-4861-a33b-61dd7629faac

@therealduckie @feditips

You can move your account to another server (in settings -> Preferences -> Appearance at the bottom).

@therealduckie You bring up a good point here, because that is a risk factor and absolutely something that could potentially happen to someone.

That's why it's a good practice to backup your data from time to time if keeping it long term is important to you, which you can do from the Import / Export link in your Preferences.

There are apparently some technical limitations which make it so you can't import your posts to a new account on a new server, but you can move your followers, block lists, mute lists, domain blocking lists, and bookmarks.

So again, it's a good practice to occasionally back these things up just so you have them in case in the unfortunate event you need them.

But, honestly this should be true of ANY service you use online and care about your data from. It's just that things have been stable enough in the past 15 years that we've all tended to get a bit lazy about it.

Personally, I also have found it to be beneficial to have accounts on multiple instances in the event one goes down, even just for temporary maintenance.

Things do happen, as sysadmins are very much human.

Hope that helps answer your question!

@therealduckie @feditips

This is true.

That’s why it’s important to chose server with care, or even, setup your own server.

You can also look for servers that has signed the Mastodon server covenant. That means they have someone else who has admin access (in case someone dies), they pledge to give users a 3 months heads up before shutting down, keeping backups and so on.

If the server is up you can always bring your account to another server.

Here’s a server where you can search for a server for you.

https://instances.social/

@casey37

The short version is:
- Authentication is handled by the instance that owns the user seeking authentication
- Untrusted instances get blacklisted in a process called defederation.
- Message/post privacy depends on trusting both the publishing and subscribing instances and their administrators. As such, nothing should be considered truly private on this or any platform that is not end to end encrypted.

Btw, the project is OSS, so you can audit it on GitHub if you know Ruby. =)

@ryhutchfilm @feditips Because the servers are being run by independent people, and some of those servers aren't even running Mastodon software.

Buying the Mastodon company (that makes the open source Mastodon software) would have approximately zero impact on any servers other than mastodon.social, which the Mastodon company does operate. All other servers remain independent, and might even choose to defederate from mastodon.social in that case.

@asdfasdfasdf @feditips at least on Mastodon I can choose which admin I want to deal with (or be my own).

As for security; 100 small safes with different locks will be challenging to exploit even if they are technically less secure than twitter or your bank.