How is a site like mastodon.social different from a site like Twitter? There is no guarantee that the site will continue to operate or continue to provide API access.
I have the feeling that people confuse 'federated' (aka provides API access) with 'distributed' (aka does not rely on specific nodes).
From the customer standpoint, I think the only real difference is that you could host your own instance and take part in the network yet still "own" your posts. I say "own" pretty loosely since they get broadcast across the network.
But in this case, even if mastododon.social went down, your posts would still be available on the network and through your own (and other) mastodon instances.
In terms of the API, this is a open source project and it needs to communicate with other nodes in the network; I believe this puts real limits on how much they can change the API.
But is running your own instance worth anything? People use social media mainly to gather followers and likes. So there needs to be a reputation at play provided by the service provider to make sure those are real. Having a gazillion followers and a trillion likes on your own instance will not make you a celebrity.
Social media doesn't have to be about celebrity, or about promoting a personal brand. The big silos have promoted this use case because it aligns with their advertising incentives. But connecting with people with similar interests is another use case, as is keeping up with your friends and family.
I also think you misunderstand how following works on the Fediverse. My main account is on a small server with about 400 users, about 50 of which are active daily, I guess. But I have around 1000 followers, almost all of whom are on other instances (probably 20 or so are on my instance).
Posts to an individual mastodon server get shared across the network, people from other instances can "follow" your account (on your server) and their instance will subscribe to your posts. They can "like" or re-post your post (with or without a comment) to get your account (on your server) more visibility and possibly more followers. In that regard I think these ideas are present, but now there is more than one server.
This is only my opinion, but I think the gathering of followers and likes is something that the commercial product requires in order to keep people engaging with a product that they might otherwise put to the side.
I can see a celebrity or official or someone wanting to run their own instance to be the "canonical" or "verified" one, like, "This really is The Rock, because the instance is from TheRock.com, their website."
> I have the feeling that people confuse 'federated' (aka provides API access) with 'distributed' (aka does not rely on specific nodes).
I think you mean federated vs. decentralized since federated is also distributed.
And before people jump into a blockchain discussion remember that blockchain ⊂ decentralization, so, in general, you (probably) don't need a blockchain to decentralized an application.
The info 'xyz liked this post' is not distributed as far as I know. It's not cryptographically signed or anything. It's just to be believed based on the reputation of the site the post is on. Or am I missing something?
'Like' is a kind of message on ActivityPub, and it can be sent from one instance to another (decentralized like email, not distributed like BitTorrent). All messages are signed by the originating server (using HTTP Signatures [0]), so you can verify that the message is actually being sent by that instance, that it has not been tampered with, and that the user the message is attributed to is a user on that instance.
There's also an option in the spec to sign message contents with JSON-LD signatures[1] using a key pair specific to the user. Mastodon and Pleroma don't use these because they're considered unnecessary and may have certain drawbacks.
Federated does mean that the network overall does not rely on a specific node.
There is no true Mastodon instance, mastodon.social is merely the biggest. I run my own mastodon instance and can federate just fine.
Federation is distributed to some extend. However, unlike pure p2p where everyone has a node, it's more like little towns and cities where people live together voluntarily. Each one is a different size, each has it's own rules and if people don't like the rules, they can leave and go elsewhere.
You're asking "how is a site like Gmail different from a site like Twitter?" If Gmail goes down, you can get a different email address elsewhere and still talk to everyone. If Twitter goes down, you can't get a Twitter handle elsewhere and still talk to everyone. Mastodon is like email.
What drives people to use social media is gathering followers and likes. You will lose those when your provider shuts down or shuts you out. And you cannot get them back.
> What drives people to use social media is gathering followers and likes.
I don't think that's true for all users, and maybe not even most. I'm not even sure that the people for whom it is true are key to other people's desire to use social media.
OTOH, persistence is key to social media where transssctionality is key to email, so losing a social media handle has a bigger impact on a social media user per se than does losing an email addresses to an email user.
Depends on who you define as 'you'. If you are 'jbb67@mastodon.social' and mastodon.social goes away or kicks you off their server, there is no more 'you'.
You would lose all subscribers, likes, comments etc.
Then you would have to find a way to prove to 'your' old friends that jbb67@someotherodomain.com is the same person as the person that formerly was 'jbb67@mastodon.social'. And have some of them follow you again etc.
The same process as if you changed from Twitter to Facebook.
you make this sound like a big painful process. i have lots of alts on fediverse on servers running difference AP and OStatus implementations and i've moved my main many times over the years. it really doesn't take that long for people to realize that you moved and what your new main is. hell, i used to update my avatar and display name daily while bouncing between different alts and people could still recognize me.
based on my experience on fedi, i think you are exaggerating the fragility of the connections you make on social media. clicking "follow" isn't a lot of effort and people will do it when they recognize your voice coming from a new source.
What you note is not as painful a thing to most...But I'll grant you that to some it still is a thing. Here's where owning your own domain name helps avoid falling into this type of trap.
Having your own domain name represents YOUR identity/persona on the web - nay, overall internet in fact. The focus here is on the portion AFTER the @ symbol. Yes, unfortunately for now, owning your own domain - for the purposes of interacting with other instances and people via these federation-type of technologies - also involves the overhead of hosting your own mastodon, gnu social, pleroma, ActivityPub server, etc. But in the future, it could be that the underlying mechanisms could be made much easier and cheaper both to use and to switch/jump...and for the most part you only need to hold onto your own domain name...and can switch to different underlying mechanisms/technology/providers/whatever...but the top-level identity is preserved as you cross to other instances, etc. Within the indieweb community - a community that supports efforts like ActivityPub, etc. - owning your own domain is usually the first step...because it represents the formal establishment of YOUR identity. An identity that you control, and where your friends/followers can always know and follow. I imagine in the future if more people adopt the practice of obtaining and sticking to using ONLY their domain name as an identifier, much of this will be easier and some it simply a moot point.
The process if you changed from Twitter to Facebook involves everyone you know also changing from Twitter to Facebook. The process of changing from mastodon.social to social.coop does not.
There is currently limited support for account migration in Mastodon, and ongoing discussions about how to improve it. It's not at the level that it's at in Hubzilla, but it's not a lost cause, either.
I have the feeling that people confuse 'federated' (aka provides API access) with 'distributed' (aka does not rely on specific nodes).