Maybe it’s not for you, no one is forcing you to use it, it is not all about you.
A woman protesting an oppressive regime with her posts may find it is the only safe place without getting her identity reported back to the oppressive state as all corporate owned platforms would do.
Good job looking into it a bit instead of freaking out like most others on here. It is running and working and has been for over 6 years if I am not mistaken, it was named pocketnet previously.
Users do not have to pay to publish. Advertisers can pay to boost content and get visibility. There are many people dedicated to free speech and anti-censorship so they will continue to run nodes even if they are not turning a profit. At this point nodes stake coins and earn rewards, not sure of the long term tokenomics, have not gone super deep on it.
The website is just a fronted, it is not running the platform. If the website is shut down you can still access the platform via the open source app, it cannot be stopped.
No, it is not. Mastodon is federated, this means your account is owned by the instance owner and can be banned. Bastyon is decentralized meaning there is no owner, your content can be blocked if there is a report and a random jury of high reputation users unanimously agrees that rules have been violated.
Good luck, we now have Bastyon, fully decentralized twitter style platform. It’s over.
Great job, it starts with us. If you want it done then do it. 🙂
Specifically in the context of this post you cannot be forced to collect any data on users or be prosecuted for not collecting because you are not hosting accounts, they are on-schain. Fedi is a very different type of platform and not really a direct alternative. Bastyon is trying to compete with twitter mainly IMO.
You do not get any special access or control by hosting a server because it is just a node that relays data. This makes the network more robust and faster as a user’s app will connect to the fastest nodes for a better experience.