Damn glad to be here. Thanks @nvk for being our far more trustworthy benevolent dictator! Don't fuck us over :)
@parkeralewis What's diferent isn't whether or not
@nvk is a trustworthy or benevolent dicator. What's different with Mastodon is how easy it is to just pick another dictator.
Since I'm self-hosting, I'm my own dictator.
@pete @parkeralewis @nvk so what does this mean in practice? You run a server which mirrors nvk's? And if he deletes a post he doesn't like, what happens on your server? Can users that also want to see that content access it through your server? Thanks for helping me get the lay of the land here.
@bitcoinpasada @pete @parkeralewis @nvk
No, Peter is running his own server, not mirroring anything. It's a separate instance.
@mrcoolbp @bitcoinpasada @parkeralewis @nvk Note that at a technical level, yes, my server is mirroring some data. But Mastodon just does that for caching to make the UI work nicely. It's not a comprehensive mirroring or anything.
@pete @mrcoolbp @parkeralewis @nvk So does mastodon offer some kind of fallback protection, like if NVK's server goes offline, can the instance fall back to another one?
@bitcoinpasada @mrcoolbp @parkeralewis @nvk Not really. User identities are tied to DNS names. Under the hood there are some crypto features that could maybe kinda do some of that functionality. But the software isn't designed for it afaik.
Take a look at Scuttlebutt. It's 100% crypto based, and can operate without any servers at all.
@jgettbtc @pete @mrcoolbp @parkeralewis @nvk wouldn't this just be the same thing as scuttlebutt that Peter mentioned?
@bitcoinpasada @jgettbtc @mrcoolbp @parkeralewis @nvk Scuttlebutt goes beyond what a mastodon server can do, as the data is passed peer to peer.
@pete @bitcoinpasada @mrcoolbp @parkeralewis @nvk Everyone just needs to run their own Mastodon instance. Problem solved.