The role of mastodon.social in the Mastodon ecosystem
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/03/the-role-of-mastodon.social-in-the-mastodon-ecosystem/
@Gargron I read this comment yesterday that I think is pretty interesting:
> The best answer to the UX issue of "where do I sign up?" is to make it so that asking the question makes no sense at all.
Right now, the single biggest barrier to having a "decentralized" Mastodon is that Mastodon is not *designed* in a decentralized way. Each Mastodon instance is actually a separate website, where both data and community are centralized within that site and its domain.
@Gargron So to make a decentralized Mastodon, you need to decouple the data from the site/domain. And effectively, you need to decouple the community as well. People choose specific sites because the instance layer handles everything: service *and* community. What we have is essentially a bunch of centralized services that can talk to each other. Interconnected silos. A network of nation-states.
@trwnh @Gargron Hubzilla seems to be boasting a step further in that direction as "Nomadic identity". i.e. You can move your account without losing your toots or followers (IIRC).
Speaking of which, an inet-independent worldwide-scale SNS is my holy grail at the moment. The closest we get is Aether (essentially DHT'ed Reddit) and a particular Open Garden app (redflagged due to, ironically, privacy issues e.g. extraneous permissions.) There's also SSb, but that's focused on many small islands.
Server run by the main developers of the project 
It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!
@Parnikkapore @Gargron i'm actually personally uninterested in full decentralization because servers are just a lot more convenient as essentially being user agents. and especially with activitypub the cool thing is that it's still just basic web stuff.
hubzilla has cool implementations but terrible advertising. "nomadic identity" is just content addressing + data replication, which isn't complex. we're halfway there just by passing around objects; we just need to be able to consistently refer