Hacker News Comment: “This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren’t looking to profit. Firstly, they care about their users and are more likely to take difficult decisions, like the one Ash has made, for the good of themselves and their users. In doing so everyone involved has time to make an orderly move.”
I really love seeing this take. It’s the first reply to this Hacker News post on the shutdown of mastodon.technology. Yes, it is a sad day amongst folks in the Fediverse, especially for folks on mastodon.technology but the network persists because it’s federated with other instances. The folks who are losing their accounts will be able to move to another instance or perhaps spin up their own!
It some ways it’s like having your own blog. If you decide to stop writing and let the domain lapse your writing will disappear but the internet of blogs continues to march along.
I’ve heard so many folks say Mastodon isn’t a good substitute to Twitter but if it isn’t, what is?
Once Elon Musk has Twitter it would be fantastic to see Twitter implement the protocols necessary to participate in the Fediverse.
What does that even mean?
It means Twitter would write some code that would allow Mastodon based servers to find it and render Twitter tweets into a unified timeline of users.
It would allow a Twitter of Twitters to blossom. Sure, Twitter is a for profit company and others could have for profit Mastodon instances but it wouldn’t be required. All that’s required is the will to fire up an instance.
A true open social experience
Folks like Manton Reese, the creator of Micro.blog, have already implemented these protocols to allow Micro.blog to federate with other Mastodon instances! In fact, I follow quite a few folks on Micro.blog from my Mastodon account on my instance, curmudgeon.cafe.
I could also see news papers, streaming companies, and movie studios running their own instances. Think of names on services like @wolfblitzer@cnn.social for Wolf Blitzer, @maggie@nytimes.social for Maggie Haberman, or @maddow@msnbc.social for Rachel Maddow. Of course I made all those names up and each of those companies may choose to use a different domain extension for their federated servers, but you get the picture.
Those custom domain names can’t be used on Twitter today because it’s completely centralized as opposed to the open, federated, system employed by Mastodon.
The really nice benefit to the federated system is the survivability of the network. If one system disappeared the remainder of the systems continue to operate. There is no set of central servers.
Hey! That’s how the internet is built!