I’m not entirely sure how to ask this, but is there some way for a Mastodon server to host only its own content while being accessible to others?
If I understood the basics of Mastodon correctly, one Mastodon server will automatically download content from another if they are federated.
That obviously leaves the potential of downloading illegal content from a rogue or unmanaged server, which may be a liability for server owners. Of course - you can defederate but I imagine that certain entities that focus on publishing information would rather not have to deal with constant moderation.
Thus, would it be possible for a server to never download from any other server (federated or not) but have its content available to any servers that federate with it? Does a feature like this exist?
What you’re describing is a blog. Writefreely is just one of many examples of a federated blog, and WordPress now has this function built-in after aquiring the ActivityPub plugin.
This is almost what I want. I looked into it and you can follow from mastodon, but it just gives a post title and a link. That’s probably because it’s a full blogging architecture. I don’t imagine users would want to have to click a link for a short bit of information.
If they could be married in some way, it would probably be perfect.