> What you want is one large centralized administration that can dictate what each smaller instance can do.

Not at all. I want some administration that’s shared between instances. If you take a SQL database and split it into one instance per table, is that "decentralization"? I would rather think that decentralization is adding more nodes to the same database, such as no data is lost if a node is down.

Mastodon is like this: instead of sharing all the messages on all instances, you have multiple independant instances that may or may not mirror the messages of other instances. If one server goes down, all the content that wasn’t mirrored is lost and all the user accounts are lost.

Okay, but the end result of your decentralization is exactly what Mastodon is. Which is in order to be truly decentralized instances should have the option to opt into one or more shared administrations. But functionally that ends up being the same thing as what you complain about which is that ultimately administration and/or accounts are localized at certain administration levels. 'Instances' in Mastodon are that administration you want.

If you try and force a shared administration and say 'This is the central administration that you register on and instances share' then you no longer have a decentralized social network. You have Reddit.

> If you try and force a shared administration and say 'This is the central administration that you register on and instances share' then you no longer have a decentralized social network.

I was thinking of something based on concensus (see also how blockchains work) but I don’t know of any social network that work like this and I don’t know if it’s feasible.