ActivityPub and Mastodon brought new incentives into the world of decentralised communication platforms, even so far as I would call it a serious alternative to platforms like Twitter. But all efforts made by hundreds of individuals every day – administrating servers, developing software and moderating communities – have a weak spot which needs to be addressed in the near future: who has control over the underlying computing infrastructure of the Fediverse? And are users aware of the conditions?

Some interesting data on hosting service centralization of mastodon instances.

  • poVoqOP
    3•3 years ago

    Hence my “depending on what you mean with distributed” ;)

    But I hate to break it to you: servers are also just computers and there is no fundamental technical difference between a federation of servers and a p2p network of “clients”.

    • musicmatze
      2•3 years ago

      yeah, well that’s true :D But what I mean is real distribution. Every client is a Server (think IPFS, or scuttlebutt fwiw).