Mastodon Servers Are Not Interchangeable

One of the design decisions, and indeed, the entire selling point, of Mastodon, is the decentralized nature of the network. Each person chooses a server (“instance”) to sign up on, and then can see other peoples statuses from any other server that their server is connected to (“federated”).

There are however, a couple of things to consider about this type of architecture. Things that might not be entirely obvious to a new user, especially one coming from a system like Twitter.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the admin of the server you are registered on has absolute, dictatorial power. This means they can decide to block or ban entire other servers in the Mastodon network for any reason they see fit. Want to follow a journalist on a server that also has a user that an admin disagrees with? Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. It’s all up to the mood of the admin running your server.

Now, if your server admin is behaving like a petty tyrant and blocking whole instances because of arbitrary (to you) reasons, you can just move to a different server. That’s the power and the beauty of a federated social network!

Except none of your posts (“toots” or “statuses”) move with you. They belong (very literally) to the server admin you were trying to leave the fiefdom of. There is absolutely no mechanism in Mastodon to migrate your content from one server to another. So if your account is deleted by an admin on a previous server, or the server shuts down for any reason, all of your content is lost.

For the true believers, this is a minor inconvenience that is necessary to have the type of network they wish to have. For a whole lot of people though, I am betting that it is a much bigger deal than those true believers would like to admit.

As Mastodon continues on, more and more people are going to figure out that if a server shutting down means losing a lot of conversations / content / statuses, and they care about their content, then they need to hedge their bets as much as possible. And the obvious way to hedge those bets is to choose a server with the greatest chance of a) continuing indefinitely, and b) federating as widely as possible, with the minimum of admin curation.

That of course, will result, eventually, in a very small pool of servers hosting the vast majority of Mastodon accounts and content. Potentially just one.