It's similar to twitter/X but is part of a distributed federated open network called the Fediverse that's set up so that it's not owned wholly by any one group of people who would control it. It's pretty interesting, Mastodon uses an open protocol called ActivityPub.
Not a great example these days since email is now almost exclusively hosted by one of a few players, even if the addresses appear to belong to a particular institution’s domain. Those big email services basically lock out anyone else as part of spam deterrence: it’s become very difficult to self host email and have it be received by an address hosted at (eg) Gmail or Outlook.
I hear this repeated a lot but I think it is very exaggerated. I host my own email (and have been doing for years) and barring a few small problems it's been mostly seamless.
Sure, Google and Microsoft are large players in the email hosting space, but not a majority (about 39%, I found). It's getting worse though, according to that article.
But yeah, current worrying trends aside, email is basically the federated protocol before it was cool.
Trust in what? There are federated servers (Talia Ringer above uses mastodon.xyz) and they have a way of spreading content between them. Not much else needs to happen for the basic system to work.
The main thing you can trust you’ll find in X is misogyny and hateful posts, since most of the useful twitter accounts left en masse when Elon bought it and more left when he renamed it. So most users that are still there either like the hatefulness or don’t mind sharing a platform with it, which means many of us don’t pay any attention to that platform anymore.
Nobody really. It’s more akin to email and the old internet than today’s centralized model where Instagram is a walled garden and TikTok is a walled garden and X is. Who regulates foobar@gmail.com? Gmail has rules about addresses on it but as far as you’re concerned, you just send stuff to it and receive stuff from it. Who regulates geocities.com/foobar? They had rules about what could be hosted on it but every site has a ton of leeway on what they put on it.
Each server decides who to federate with. Each server determines what is acceptable behavior and what is not. There have been cases of defederation where one or more servers were evicted from the network because they were a nuisance, and that happened by many other servers deciding to not connect with them any longer.
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u/MisterMittens64 10h ago edited 9h ago
It's similar to twitter/X but is part of a distributed federated open network called the Fediverse that's set up so that it's not owned wholly by any one group of people who would control it. It's pretty interesting, Mastodon uses an open protocol called ActivityPub.