The bitcoin comparison seems reasonable from the outside, but IMO misses the motivations of the people behind these services.
With cryptocurrency projects, people have a massive financial incentive to build them, promote them, take people's money, then disappear. It costs money to make the product, so you make more if you just pretend the money has disappeared.
With mastodon instances, I don't see the parallel. The benefit to instance admins is that they get to participate in a community that follows exactly their rules, and be in control of their own identity (and those of the users of the instance). They only get that benefit as long as they keep running the instance.
As in instance user the risks I can see are:
- The instance shuts down without warning, so the account migration feature can't be used. This can happen for technical reasons, or because the instance admin wants to screw with people, but there's no real motivation for doing that. The risk is also perfectly manageable -- backups are a good idea, and most people keep an eye on who's following them and follow back if appropriate.
- Your data gets used in a way you don't like (admin sells it, or looks at your DMs, or gets hacked). Again, I don't see the issue for most users -- it's a social network, most of the interesting stuff is public. Are people really using the DMs on social networks for stuff they want to keep private? That just feels like the wrong tool for the job. IP logs might be interesting, but there's not much you can do with them these days, and if you think you're likely to be a target there are ways to mask that.
Most of these problems are really the same or worse for centralised social networks, especially as they generally want ID verification (via phone numbers), which makes the data more sensitive, and a much more attractive target than some random instance with 5 users.
Anyway, sorry for the long reply, I was mostly irked by the bitcoin comparison, and for hitting some common anti-mastodon talking points that never made much sense to me. I agree that regular people trying to use it will probably have issues caused by misunderstanding -- in my mind it's more like twitter re-worked for nerds who like IRC, rather than twitter 2.0 for everyone.
With cryptocurrency projects, people have a massive financial incentive to build them, promote them, take people's money, then disappear. It costs money to make the product, so you make more if you just pretend the money has disappeared.
With mastodon instances, I don't see the parallel. The benefit to instance admins is that they get to participate in a community that follows exactly their rules, and be in control of their own identity (and those of the users of the instance). They only get that benefit as long as they keep running the instance.
As in instance user the risks I can see are:
- The instance shuts down without warning, so the account migration feature can't be used. This can happen for technical reasons, or because the instance admin wants to screw with people, but there's no real motivation for doing that. The risk is also perfectly manageable -- backups are a good idea, and most people keep an eye on who's following them and follow back if appropriate.
- Your data gets used in a way you don't like (admin sells it, or looks at your DMs, or gets hacked). Again, I don't see the issue for most users -- it's a social network, most of the interesting stuff is public. Are people really using the DMs on social networks for stuff they want to keep private? That just feels like the wrong tool for the job. IP logs might be interesting, but there's not much you can do with them these days, and if you think you're likely to be a target there are ways to mask that.
Most of these problems are really the same or worse for centralised social networks, especially as they generally want ID verification (via phone numbers), which makes the data more sensitive, and a much more attractive target than some random instance with 5 users.
Anyway, sorry for the long reply, I was mostly irked by the bitcoin comparison, and for hitting some common anti-mastodon talking points that never made much sense to me. I agree that regular people trying to use it will probably have issues caused by misunderstanding -- in my mind it's more like twitter re-worked for nerds who like IRC, rather than twitter 2.0 for everyone.