cdeversApr 7, 2017

Twitter thread on drawbacks of Mastodon's federated approach:

https://twitter.com/adrienneleigh/status/850243710973493248

TL;DR— Federation is great, but it kills privacy. If you want private posts, or want to delete posts, all you can do is request a deletion, but other Mastondon/GNUSocial instances don't have to honor that.

Moreover, it kills identity: anyway can be “@you” on some new Mastodon instance.

These problems are intrinsic to Federation, and will not necessarily be easy to fix.

Show threadJosh
@cdevers @you Or it means we need to reconsider what identity means online? We don't all have unique names in real life. I'm sure there are plenty of people with the same name as me; probably thousands of them.
Is it realistic that all these people can expect a unique username online?
Apr 7, 2017 at 4:52pmWeb
Show threadcdeversApr 7, 2017
@josh Well sure, of course. Some of this isn't necessarily bad, but users need to understand the pros & cons of centralized vs federated platforms.