Mastodon has seen a renewed interest these last few days, but when you look at the statistics mastodon.social siphons the biggest part of the pie, it sees a few thousands new sign-ups a day, while medium sized instance and smaller ones only get a few, sometimes just single digits increase.
This has been exacerbated since mastodon changed its UI both on web and mobile apps, to make the flagship instance the default one for sign-up in an effort to lower the entry barrier, which on the same time is leading to unhealthy concentration, on a platform that advocates for decentralization through federation.
Do you think this is the way forward on the fediverse ?
#mastodon #pixelfed #lemmy #fediverse
It’s not an issue. As long as .social is able to maintain the load.
The good thing about decentralization is that at any moment anyone could open a new instance and it would work perfectly fine. It does not matter if one instance have more or less users.
If it lowers the entry barrier it is welcome. It should not matter at all.
It is an issue if .social ever decides to “Be evil”, and utilized their outsized influence over the rest of the 'verse.
Edit: The concept is known as “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
The thing about the fediverse is that it’s incredibly easy to make an instance and they are all compatible. So if any instance becomes evil people just have to seamlessly move away.
It’s not like twitter where if the owner become evil there’s nothing to do. Here you just move instance and be done with it, still the same platform, still the same users.
So if any instance becomes evil people just have to seamlessly move away.
The bad assumption here is that everyone knows about the wrongdoings of an admin. When the power is abused, the masses don’t know to move. The mastodon.social admins arbitrarily block whoever expresses a viewpoint they oppose. The thousands of users who that power affects are mostly unaware. The rest are too lazy to move.
The mastodon.social instance /is/ evil. Yet people have not moved away.
and they are all compatible.
This is not a given. Anyone can fork the protocol. If they are a large enough instance, they can include evil features in their fork, and block any instance that doesn’t use that fork. The users of competing forks then don’t have access, and their users move to a cooperating instance.
It has happened before; It will happen again.
The problem isn’t centralization, but the concept of a “generalist” instance. Instances should be more focused in concept and scope, and usable locally without feeling the need to scroll all.
I agree w/your underlying thesis – that having more thematic instances would improve the fedi. But it’s a bit of a false dichotomy to frame centralization as “not the problem”. Centralization is a problem of both power concentration and also fault tolerance (lemmy.world goes down and we lose half the fedi).
Having more thematic instances helps curb centralization. It’s part of the solution. We still need other mechanisms to create balance.
I kind of disagree. In the sense that people have multiple interests and identities.
If you are a french person who likes anime and technology. Where so you sign up, to the French instance, the anime one, the one focused on technology? You have to make and maintain one account for every interest you have?
I think instances should be bland an irrelevant. Like email addresses. They should say nothing about the users of that instance. Imho, the goal should be that people just sign in in the most convenient instance and should not have to think again in which instance they are.
You have to make and maintain one account for every interest you have?
Giving you wrote that 2 yrs ago, I guess by now you must know that you don’t need an acct on every node that carries communities of interest. Nothing about a balanced fedi forces you to maintain many accounts.
Nonetheless, it’s a good idea to have several accounts anyway, particularly for privacy. And also to not be blinded by fedi politics that creates bubbles. Maintaining multiple accounts is a burden but it’s only because we don’t have good client apps. A good app can make multiple accts seamless.
think instances should be bland an irrelevant.
Yikes. What a horrible way to organise communities. Two of the best known thematic instances are down right now: mander.xyz and slrpnk.net. People are feeling the loss precisely because of the loss of well organised communities.
Dumb
