That last point is a doozy. Mastodon servers can be as bad as subreddits with power tripping mods, and you don’t necessarily know that until the day you cross a line that you didn’t know existed, just like on reddit.
And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts.
Going from one server (Twitter) to multiple smaller servers doesn’t seem to go far enough on the axis to address major issues that Twitter has. e.g. you still don’t “own” your content.
> [...] until the day you cross a line that you didn’t know existed, [...] And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts.
Exactly. This is the critical flaw in Mastodon's design. It does not solve the single biggest flaw in Twitter (or any other typical platform) design, where the platform operator owns the network, and not the author/user.
This is why I won't bother investing my own personal time and effort in joining anyone else's server, given how the current design is implemented.
It's sad that BitTorrent has now existed for 21 years, and still no one has built a social media content distribution network on top of it. I would have done it but I don't have the motivation to do it alone, as it would tilt control away from the platform operators who require that control in order to monetize the platform to make it worth the investment.
> And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts.
Well, you pretty much can't migrate your posts anyway even if you're moving without being nuked. But if you get nuked, you probably can't move your followers either which would suck.
Well, I suppose if you migrate your account from Twitter to Twitter, you'll probably keep your followers and posts. Then again, given its current state, I'd not be inclined to put money on that.
> You can move your account with followers easily (but not posts).
That's what I thought based on what I've read so far, thanks for confirming.
Unless and until that's fixed, if I finally see enough value in joining Mastodon, I will have to do so using my own server where I have full access to all my content.
You can export all your content, including posts, but Mastodon doesn't support directly importing posts, so you need either a (very) friendly admin or your own server if you want to import it somewhere new.
Yeah this is probably a needed feature. There are some good philosophical objections to post imports, but they’re overwhelmed by practical arguments for it. it’s a solvable problem.
Absolutely agree. I think solutions will come, but they may well come as an extension or fork first until it's pointless for the core developers to resist.
It's particularly idiotic because the Activities in the export are all signed, so an importing server just need to do a webfinger and profile lookup, and can then validate all of the posts. Of course you can still fake them, but if you show a "moved from <origin instance>" on them, that's really all you need to do - moves from, say, mastodon.social would be trustworthy, moves from some small instance would not.
But even that can be fixed with tamper proof timestamps and signing the whole archive, and in any case you can validate this against the public API because it remains accessible on the origin server (at least for some time after the initial move, I don't know how long).
Any you want as long as you're happy with their rules.
> whether I should start my own server
It's currently faff (but potentially getting better.)
> how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily
You can move your account with followers easily (but not posts). Can take a while for everything to filter through on busy servers though.