>I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
Indeed. As you said, it's the people, not the technical details of the "protocol" or "platform". My "favorite" Mastadon example: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
I see your example as a positive in favor of mastodon over other social networks.
When the one responsible for running the site can not run it anymore, it effects everyone on that website.
Examples:
- Digg (killed by owners removing their own product)
- Myspace (killed by new ownership leaving site to rot)
- Google+ (killed by Google)
- Facebook (killed by enshitification)
- Tumblr (killed by new ownership's rules)
- Twitter (killed by unhinged new ownership)
But mastodon is actually decentralised by design and implementation.
Mastodon as a whole isn't a single website, but instead is a whole collection of groups each running on their own server that can interact with each other as if they were one large site.
So with mastodon: when a site runner loses their ability to keep a site running (e.g. your example), only the single mastodon server/group is affected, the users move to a different group, and the rest of mastodon keeps running as if nothing has changed (because in the grand scheme of things, nothing has).