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If you're just getting started on here, you may be wondering why this place has so many servers and apps. Why make it so complicated?

Click here to find out why:

➡️ fedi.tips/mastodon-and-the-fed

Twitter is all on one server (twitter.com). This made it VERY easy for Musk to buy it. Any centralised network can be bought out just like this.

The Fediverse is different: as long as we stay spread out on many servers, no one will ever be able to buy this network, not even the richest person in the world.

fedi.tipsMastodon and the Fediverse: Beginners Start Here | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the FediverseAn unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse
Tracy Hall

@feditips

well, no, it most certainly is not. I can unequivocally say it is spread across HUNDREDS, if not THOUSANDS of actual servers, managed by a load-balancing service. But it is under centralized control and ownership.

It's the federation protocols, not the multiple servers

@video_manager @feditips eh, I think we're getting hung up on the meaning of "server." There's "server" as in "server/client". Twitter has one server in that sense. Yes, it runs on multiple machine servers, but I don't think that's important to the concept. Fediverse literally has multiple servers in both the physical sense and the relationship paradigm.

@pjhenry1216 @feditips

Hence the last line "It's the federation protocols, not the multiple servers".

This isn't twitter it helps to read the full post.

@video_manager @feditips no. It's not just protocols. It's literally that there's multiple servers. That's the most important part. Protocols just communicate between two points.

@video_manager @feditips I don't want to get into an argument, but protocols only do so much. The data needs to live somewhere. It either lives under one jurisdiction or multiple. Federation is an architecture. Protocols are only part of that. Twitter, you have one source *serving* data. Federated has multiple sources *serving* data. Your posts get sent to a different server than mine.

@video_manager @feditips how would federated instances communicate without an agreed-upon protocol?

ActivityPub is a standard managed by W3C, but anyone can build their own server that implements it. Without a federation protocol, you don't have any federation at all.

@kkeller @feditips

Hence the last line "it's the federation protocols, not the multiple servers"

@video_manager @feditips ...so, do you have a better idea for federated servers without an agreed upon protocol?

@kkeller @feditips

What a ridiculous Bad Faith Troll. Did you just come over from the birdsite?

@video_manager @feditips if you don't like what I have to say, feel free to block me instead of being needlessly argumentative.

@video_manager @feditips Yeah that's what I don't get by this. There's many different servers and stuff, but mastodon itself is still owned by someone and that could be bought by some really rich person, surely?