
Why does decentralization matter? - daveid
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/12/why-does-decentralization-matter/
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mikekchar
I use mastodon and like it. Other than HN (which I also count as a "social
platform"), it's the only social platform I use. It is also decentralized.
However, I have not found that it works particularly well as a decentralized
social platform. 100% of the people I follow and the people who follow me are
on the mastodon instance I'm on. I've actually made efforts to branch out, but
I find it impossible. The network effect means that the whole of the external
feed is full of stuff I'm completely uninterested in and there are no tools
(that I know of) to whittle it down. For me this is a significant hurdle that
stands in the way of them realizing their goals.

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Avamander
Another significant hurdle I've seen is how hard it is to get external content
into your feed - I want to consume content, from RSS feeds and multitude of
other sources, not create content.

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solarkraft
That's not quite what Mastodon is for, but there are many bots publishing RSS
feeds, many of which can be found on botsin.space.

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Avamander
Well, given that most people don't have content creators in their social
circles it sounds rather short-sighted if Mastodon intentionally lacks methods
to bring content (creators) to the platform.

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solarkraft
It's not short-sighted since it's not its _intent_ to be an RSS reader.

I also wouldn't call it short-sighted that Mastodon lacks embedded racing
games :-)

I think it's a nice idea to have RSS feeds available on Mastodon, but without
changing the technical basis quite a bit (I think), this won't happen without
Bots as proxies.

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majui
Decentralization makes it harder to stop political or state actors from
manipulating social media, anonymously and invisibly. It makes it harder to
stop the propagation of toxic and inflammatory messages.

I don't say "impossible" because the state can shut down the Internet or
illegalize decentralized software.

