An interesting article I saw (from 2019) describing the potential intrinsic tendency for decentralized platforms to collapse into de facto centralized ones.
Author identifies two extremes, “information dictatorship” and “information anarchy”, and the flaws of each, as well as a third option “information democracy” to try and capture the best aspects of decentralization while eschewing the worst.
what makes Mastodon style federation even better than that is that you can move your account from one server to another in a way you really can’t for email.
Not sure how that works. With emails, if I move from [email protected] to [email protected] I lose my old emails and people trying to contact me there, but I can just start over. If I remember peoples’ emails I can also tell them I moved to protonmail and to talk to me there. With federation, if I move servers I lose my comment, post, and upvoted history; people messaging me; and my subscribed communities; but I can just start over. If I remember people’s usernames and subscribed communities I can tell the people I moved and to talk to me there, and re-subscribe on the new account. Unlike with email I can still see my old account’s comments and posts, but otherwise I’m not sure how moving accounts in the Fediverse is different from changing emails.
With federation, if I move servers I lose my comment, post, and upvoted history; people messaging me; and my subscribed communities
That is in no way an inherent limitation. It’s just a current limitation with Lemmy and kbin.
You can move from one Mastodon instance to another and take your followers and follows with you. And if you move to a Calckey-bases instance, you can even import your old posts.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
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Not sure how that works. With emails, if I move from [email protected] to [email protected] I lose my old emails and people trying to contact me there, but I can just start over. If I remember peoples’ emails I can also tell them I moved to protonmail and to talk to me there. With federation, if I move servers I lose my comment, post, and upvoted history; people messaging me; and my subscribed communities; but I can just start over. If I remember people’s usernames and subscribed communities I can tell the people I moved and to talk to me there, and re-subscribe on the new account. Unlike with email I can still see my old account’s comments and posts, but otherwise I’m not sure how moving accounts in the Fediverse is different from changing emails.
That is in no way an inherent limitation. It’s just a current limitation with Lemmy and kbin.
You can move from one Mastodon instance to another and take your followers and follows with you. And if you move to a Calckey-bases instance, you can even import your old posts.
Thank you for the clarification! I don’t use Mastodon because I’ve never really been interested in Twitter, so I was very unaware of that.