mastodon.ar.al is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
This is my personal fediverse server.

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Aral Balkan

@martijn This is also true.

If only web hosts were more interoperable. Hopefully we’ll be able to build a good abstraction layer for Domain for this on the Small Web although I’m starting out with Hetzner too because it’s the easiest to use (API) and excellent value for money (we need to charge for the servers but I don’t want us or others to charge so much that it’s untenable for people. Maybe once we’ve proven the model works we can get governments/EU to take their heads out of their asses and support us from the common purse. Given what I’ve seen in the last decade with politicians and the EU, I’m not holding my breath for that and nor am I basing the system on it.)

@aral @martijn Yes, anyone (including me) can easily fall into that trap. Convenience (low cost, ease of use, etc.) unfortunately often leads to hidden dependencies and a concentration on a few infrastructure and toolset providers somewhere down in the tech stack.

But even though decentralization will probably never be 100%, it always makes sense to think about it, try it, and be aware of it.

@af @martijn @aral I run a friendica, hubzilla, and mastodon, the hubzilla and friendica both have a lot of protocols they speak so between then they interface with the vast majority of the fediverse. I personally prefer long format macro blogging and hence mostly use my friendica node, but many prefer the others. But point being that being connected to multiple networks and being able to connect to people on any of them provides a greater degree of diversity and less dependency upon one.