It's not clear to me if that cultural preference is going to hold for the long run though, especially given search engines like Google already crawl Mastodon instances (though presumably they obey robots.txt)
DECENTRALIZED AI
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Decentralized Search: Why Mastodon Rejects Centralized Indexing
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You can't – and any time someone tries to build a centralized search engine large portions of the Mastodon community politely but firmly ask them not to – it's a cultural thing there I'm working towards being able to search my own stuff plus stuff that's come through my timeline
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Building AI Together Without Profit Incentives
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And remember, the most radical thing about this is that there's no profit motive to get you on board Saying "if you want us to join you gotta make it smoother" isn't the killer argument it would be if this was a VC funded startup We genuinely get to build this one together
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Decentralized Systems: Avoiding Centralization Risks in AI
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The challenge here is that centralized systems will ALWAYS have a usability advantage. The cost of that is that they can be bought, and ruined We gotta put a bit of extra work in if we want to avoid that happening to us again in the future
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Twitter centralization risks revealed by platform dependency irony
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Twitter worked well enough for me that the benefits of federation always felt more ideological and theoretical than practical to me I mean, how much could possibly go wrong with a well established public company?
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Federated networks offer true ownership against billionaire control
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I resisted the federated thing for SO long, but now I'm there it feels really natural, to the point that I have trouble imagining myself being tempted away by something that DIDN'T give me that ownership of my own destiny I don't want my space to be bought by another billionaire
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Mastodon API Hackability Versus Twitter’s Restrictive Approach
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I'm finding the hackability of the Mastodon ecosystem _extremely_ beguiling – Twitter's API increasingly felt like I'd get in trouble if I did anything particularly interesting with it
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Mastodon UX Design: Decentralization Challenges and User Experience
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I think the UX of Mastodon is extraordinarily good considering the difficulty of what it is trying to achieve It's always been 100x easier to design usable products if they are centralized. But centralized platforms can be bought and ruined even after you trust them for 16 years
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Decentralized Networks Worth Their Infrastructure Costs
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Generally though there are definite costs involved in having a network that someone like Elon can't ruin I've decided that I can tolerate them
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Improving decentralized instance performance and federation
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My plan for that is to not do anything on my instance that makes other instances want to block me! I've got used to my messages not showing up elsewhere for a few minutes (up to ~40 minutes in some cases) My current hunch is there's low hanging fruit for improving performance