Mastodon

There's a fundamental fact that people fail (or refuse) to grasp about decentralized services like Mastodon (and Lemmy) - they don't actually exist in any standard sense.

"Mastodon" is really just a handy collective name for the ad hoc community of innumerable individual sites that each independently run the Mastodon software.

And yes, as Rochko notes, there is nobody who can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi (or for the fediverse to do or not do any other thing). It's necessarily up to the individual instance owners to do as they see fit. And that's very much the point.

It astonishes me how many people can't seem to wrap their heads around that simple but crucial fact.

They'll need to be careful. Both BlueSky and X may launch covert, bot-powered attacks to try to take down or cripple the largest Mastodon instances. I am also concerned about GitHub (many projects are run by very few devs who aren't invincible and can get scammed into accidentally including malware in an official update), and Lemmy, similarly, and now Android's closing ecosystem.

The Web is becoming so nuts lately... Capitalism is truly cancerous and ruthless. I don't know what solution there is to this madness... maybe just Linux-everything and a return to local intranets instead of the Internet, but that has its own numerous challenges...