Nobody Cares About Decentralization Until They Do (2024)

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

Kye

39 points

5 comments

kyefox.comTechstory

calmmixed

Debate

60/100

DecentralizationMastodonActivitypub

Key topics

Decentralization

Mastodon

Activitypub

The article discusses how people tend to care about decentralization only when it directly affects them, and the discussion revolves around the limitations and potential improvements of decentralized social networks like Mastodon.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

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First comment

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3-4h

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Key moments

01Story posted
Aug 31, 2025 at 11:52 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Aug 31, 2025 at 3:44 PM EDT
4h after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
1 comments in 3-4h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Sep 1, 2025 at 4:46 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04

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Discussion (5 comments)

Showing 5 comments

ranger_danger

4 months ago

2 replies

> Mastodon and the broader ActivityPub (AP) network offer little hope here. Everything lived on that server.

> we don't all run our own copy of the entire stack

Why can't we do just that in a user-friendly way?

What if every user had all their content stored locally on a (or multiple) device, whether that's their phone, a desktop, server, anything, just something that keeps a local copy of their data and then federates that with other servers... that way they can always easily move wherever they want, and the data is still visible from some other server so they don't have to run their own.

KyeAuthor

4 months ago

There are apps in development for AT that do this. I just wish I could remember any of their names. There's a backup tool but it's not quite the same: https://bsky.app/profile/storacha.network/post/3lrgja7t6uc24

I don't know what keeps this from happening with AP.

skybrian

4 months ago

You can back it up, but how do you restore it? are there ActivityPub servers that let you backfill posts? And since the unique id of the post is a URL, any references would break if you moved the post.

shellkr

4 months ago

One of the great things with Mastodon is that in case of your instance shutting down you can just move to another one. I have moved from Mastodon -> Firefish -> Mastodon without issue. In the case of Firefish the instance shut down... So I do not follow your point.

blitzar

4 months ago

> Nobody cares about decentralization until they do

... and then they, rounded to the nearest meaningful whole percentage point of the population, still don't care.

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ID: 45084126Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 7:40:50 PM

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