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.
@trwnh What that comment hints at is distribution, not decentralization. Like having a global state with different access points, like those blockchain networks.
@Gargron I don't think it needs to be necessarily like blockchain, but you could have a distributed database of posts, yeah. Relays could be Groups, with their own moderation and community. More IRC-like or Usenet-like replication. But the first step would be location-independent addressing. Where you sign up becomes part of your identity, in a way that is not easily changeable.
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since im soapboxing already:
Id honestly prefer allowing instances to decouple their local timeline and 'subscribe' to other local timelines, so that multiple instances could share one 'community' timeline. Preferably this could also be done at the per-user level where individual users could subscribe to certain timelines (with some moderation features ofc). Not sure how feasible in the AP spec this would be tho.
@oct2pus @Gargron data can still federate out of the "mastodon network" entirely as well, so it's still federation. on a user level no one should care how it works as long as they can continue to make posts and follow others. nowhere in the AP spec does it require absolute authority to the domain name; it simply requires that IDs be https uris on the domain namespace.
the problem is that every single implementation stops right there and assumes location = identity. they never fully dereference
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