Once I had a mastodon solo server. ostatus.taiyolab.com, and rebooted this week.
I won a Japanese literary award in 2018 with a story collection including an SF novella about developing a decentralized transport protocol based on mastodon when/if Twitter obeys censorship laws by big countries.
The title of that novella is “On the Shoulder of the Giant Elephant”.
The story is starting on a commuting train, protagonist Fuzui (you may be noticed that it’s a synonym of my family name) found a tweet that Twitter is available in China. Fuzui had got surprised because it means that Twitter made the Chinese government read their user’s activities including private messages. Fuzui loved Twitter for a while. He developed an HTML client for Twitter, promoted Twitter in his working company and he communicated with many people including overseas. Fuzui loved the balance of Twitter, freedom between liberty, commercial opportunities between public responsibility. Not perfect but they showed the possibilities to communicating with all over the world.
But it had gone… Fuzui decided to make a solution using Mastodon, a decentralized SNS network solution. Fuzui started to develop end-to-end encryption…
I say it’s an SF, I love that work. I actually launched a server on writing days.
At the awards party, a famous Japanese writer Natsuhiko Kyogoku asked me if Twitter goes to there.
I answered “Not now, but when they should earn as like standard company, they do”.
I hoped that my words were wrong, but the situation came.
Rebooted ostatus.taiyolab.com will go on.
Actually, according to Mastodon’s instructions (a tip located at the top of the private message page), Mastodon is not actually end-to-end encrypted either, which means that users should not use it to send private messages. But Mastodon’s decentralized management (rather than being managed by a few large companies) makes it harder to centralize user information and improves security.
Recently, Mastodon has also become known in China. (And not only Mastodon, but also Misskey and some others Fediverse things.) As you said, this science fiction story has been turned into a prophecy because of the reality!