Comment by danpalmer

Being beholden to a particular server I have no control over sounds like what happened with Twitter/X.

The posts might exist, but they aren't associated with me. Why not? Because I was locked into somewhere and unable to vote with my feet and go elsewhere.

Maybe I stopped paying because the instance owner enforced sanctions against my country? Why should I lose my identity because of that?

> Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization.

Compatibility issues means lock-in to instances under individual control. Shared protocols means lock-in to a protocol, but ultimately freedom to move. We know that open protocols trumps opt-in collaboration by private entities for freedom.

> You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access.

See also: instances not federating with other instances that are too small. You technically can, but in practice it goes nowhere.

> On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely.

Bluesky is not perfect, but where it's approaching full decentralisation quickly on a solid foundation, ActivityPub has become the Mastodon show, and is less a decentralised social network, and more a federated set of centralised services with little accountability to users. You can't move, you can't control the content you see, you can't even search. It's a reversion to the days of 14 year olds drunk on power as a mod on a phpbb forum, or the Reddit mods of today.