Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy

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Yeah. I'm surprised businesses haven't been quicker to setup self-hosted Mastodon as their primary, and then mirror that to Twitter and Bluesky and such, for disaster recovery protection.

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Mastodon doesn't by design

There is a trending section, and it does boost popular tags based on user interaction. It doesn't shovel crap into personal feeds like traditional social media, but it's not entirely lacking discovery features either.

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They don't control the domain registrar's at least. Yet. (Or at least not de jure)

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Don’t they have their own DNS? It’s called Route 53 I think?

Though I don’t think you are required to use it with your AWS hosts. But that’s not exactly what I meant by pulling the plug. They could quite literally pull the plug on your service. (Disconnect you from switches/routers, power off your hosts, etc.)

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Oh indeed, don't disagree there, we are as in most respects, at the mercy of our corporate overlords

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You'd need something that is literally only a few clicks and it's set up, and it auto updates with 0 user intervention. Until that happens your typical business will never want to touch their own hosted mastodon server.

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Yeah. I think we're waiting for the kind of installers and updaters that WordPress achieved before we see typical businesses running their own.

But I do think many organizations have got the risk/reward wrong, by underestimating the risk, at the moment.

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Not much, probably. For small scale usecase, like a VPS, AWS is horrifically expensive. For a 4GB of ram VPS, AWS is 30 USD a month, whereas you can get that for 10 USD a month, elsewhere.

AWS does this because of vender lock in. For the few times when a consumer of theirs needs a VPS (or some other service cheaper elsewhere, it's less effortt to continue to use AWS than to go someplace else.

But for individuals and small organizations, like the fediverse servers, we can just start out on the cheaper options.

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Trending section often unusable and basically only rewards the majority (a.k.a Western fediverse).

If you host instance for non-English language for local communities, trending will quickly populated with Western/US-centric conversation and news.

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Social media is a cancer on society.