I just now realized that #Mastodon is pretty much the modern day incarnation of the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s and 90s. Anyone remember #FidoNet ? It was the most popular BBS software in that time. Any admin could host FidoNet on their server and it connect it to other FidoNet servers. Hence someone could join a FidoNet "instance" of their choosing and be connected to numerous other instances. Mastodon is like a BBS over an http protocol... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
@SteveJohnson agreed but we didn't have social justice warriors saying "You need to block ... because they say mean things"
It kind of runs like bearshare used to after Napster got shut down. It had a peer to peer discovery so you could search for something obscure and in a couple of hours it found it
I'm sure it would be possible @SteveJohnson a bit like usenet and the alt.binaries
I wouldn't want to go there.
@ChrisWilson For that matter, I wonder if Mastodon could someday incorporate a P2P framework allowing individual users to make available files on their local drives?