I’m all about #mastodon’s commitment to decentralization and being ad free, but there are trades offs. For instance, although you can change servers, you’re basically cloning your account (which isn’t easy), and so you are hostage to your server 1/

Which is being hosted by someone who makes no money from devoting their bandwidth to it. That’s why most people are having slow experiences on Mastodon right now. 2/

And if your host decides to turn off your server, that’s it for you! 3/

One way out would be for nonprofits (universities, governments) to host servers as public goods (town squares). Another would be to switch to blockchain-style decentralization, although I have no idea what the technical issues are there with going that way. 4/

Anyway, this is basically revealing a basic tension in how we manage access to communication: there are clear dangers allowing one person to control the means of communication, but centralization has major advantages that may make it inevitable /fin