Mastodon (and I suppose ActivityPub in general) conflates hosting location with username. If I have a username like @bob@mastodon.social, then my stuff has to be accessible at mastodon.social's IP address (the A record).
Compare to email, where the MX record provides a layer of indirection. ActivityPub technically has a feature like this using a .well-known file, but it leaks into the user interface n unpleasant ways.
Except they frequently do, because you don't own the domain your mastodon identity is tied to.
There's promising work in this area, but as yet none of the major implementations support separating 'hosting' from 'identity' the way (eg) email has for at least 20 years (probably longer, I wasn't there).
Mastodon can work as an oAuth Provider, I believe.
But the interest thing is that I'd like to do the opposite: I'd like to be able to use my own id (openID, public key, DNS record, whatever) and use it as my identity on any activitypub server. Then the servers would be truly a simple hosting provider.
masto.host is not affiliated with mastodon.social or the Mastodon project. It's an independent managed hosting provider run by Hugo Gameiro (@hugo@masto.pt)
Mastodon handles this almost perfectly. No one can take down an ActivityPub server, but moderators can choose to not sync with hostile actors. If the users disagree with the moderator's decision, they migrate to another host and take all their data with them.
Mastodon requires more than simply ActivityPub to be able to interact with it. Its user discovery is based on WebFinger and if you don't have that working, your service won't be able to be interact with Mastodon servers.
I stand corrected. I'd still rather have my own personal handle that I could point to any given Mastodon account (kind of like how email aliases work) but it's absolutely better than nothing.
The biggest problem with federation is easily visible in e-mail: the server “owns” your address and therefore moving in very hard. It’s not much better than any other silo in that way. Mastodon is a bunch of small social sites in a trenchcoat.
There are ways to make identity floating and separate from the server, at least in theory, but ActivityPub (the protocol under Mastodon and many other things) does not implement anything like this.
I don't think I understand what you mean by Mastodon being people's living rooms.
I mean, a user's identity is @username@domain, and I can follow local or remote users equally easy, and most of the time I don't even notice where they are posting from.
If that's my living room, it sure looks like a living room that's wide open and the size of the planet.
I had absolutely no issues with hosting my own mastodon, I pay $7 dollars a month for a VPS with backups. I'm the only user that can register on my instance so it's just me.
I'm `@aj@s.aj.immo` and I can follow and have conversations with other mastodon users of various servers seamlessly. I was just doing it this evening in a thread while tagging four different people on four different servers. When people tag me in posts it just looks like `@aj`
This is the right way to do this stuff in my opinion.
Mastodon has no home to phone to. You only host your own user's data and the data they request by e.g. following users on other instances. If your users don't follow anyone on the outside, nothing will leave your instance.
I am coming around more and more to the metaphor that "mastodon is email and activitypub is SMTP". At which point for good or ill verification becomes a server-level problem: see http://blog.archive.org/2022/11/13/we-have-added-a-mastodon-... ; archive.org has a staff-only server, and we'll know if interesting things are afoot if potus@whitehouse.pub or mayor@yourtown.gov or whatever start to exist.
You're forgetting that Mastodon runs on ActivityPub, which means that the point is to divide users into different servers. For example, when everyone joined mastodon.social, the balance tipped and a lot of users lost access. Concentrating users into a single instance is not what's supposed to happen.
Ideally, you wouldn't want to go through joinmastodon.org and join the highest ranking server since that would centralize the whole protocol. It's favorable for everyone using the service that you join invite-only niche servers or self host.
If I own a domain I can host my email anywhere. I own the name, and every possible address. Mastodon does not have nearly the same level of portability and ownership. This is why I think AT is more promising.
Mastodon isn't a social network. It's a client/web app to the Fediverse, distributed social network for which there are many different implementations (Pleroma, Misskey, Pixelfed, PeerTube, et. al.) which communicate via the ActivityPub protocol (over HTTP).
Compare to email, where the MX record provides a layer of indirection. ActivityPub technically has a feature like this using a .well-known file, but it leaks into the user interface n unpleasant ways.
reply