The reason Mastodon and the Fediverse is spread out on so many servers is it protects it from being taken over by anyone. Not even the richest can buy this place.
Centralised services like Twitter are incredibly easy to buy out. If you move from Twitter to another centralised service, sooner or later that will get bought out too.
The point of the Fediverse is to break this buyout cycle, to let people be permanently in control of their accounts. More info here:
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. =)
@cogspace man I wish.
Somewhat technical but never managed to focus into programming languages after elementary school introduction.
That's my only concern here so far is what happens if one or more federated servers has an issue, any warnings at least to admins?
@casey37 I'm not aware of anything automated, but it would be pretty straightforward to defederate a server that has been compromised in some way. Users could then establish new identities elsewhere or wait for their home instance to be restored from a backup.
Just as with email, I suspect that this will ultimately trend toward a few large well-trusted instances containing the majority of users (already kind of the case) and a bunch of tiny instances with a relative handful of accounts each.
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Jeff Childers
Jon Molnar 