Twitter, let's talk about decentralization and federation and trust and why movements towards federated systems like Mastadon are maybe not where we want to be throwing effort and adoption drives behind if the end goal is privacy-preserving infrastructure.
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I've ranted about Masatadon before, don't get me wrong, it's cool, but the threat model and economics of federated systems like it devolve to concentrating trust in the hands of a few, while missing out on the scale advantages of a purely centralized solution.
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Case in point, during the initial Mastadon drive nearly everyone signed up to a single instance, and that instance had arguably worse privacy protections than regular twitter. There are more instances now, but the problems persist
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(Another grand example is email, where a ridiculous amount of power is now concentrated in the hands of google despite the decentralized nature of the protocol)
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If our goal is privacy preservation, and thus, control distribution, we must develop better models such that "the best federated server gets all the users" doesn't happen.
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Completely agree. I see Mastodon as an important step in the right direction (and part of the bridge from here to there). Would love to hear your thoughts on what we’re working on (federated *personal* web sites – single-tenant – w e2e-encrypted DMs) https://indienet.info
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