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
Dumb
If the protocol doesn’t give incentives for an even distribution of users, it’s not going to be solved by blaming individual instances or individual users.
We have to be diligent, and work hard, to keep the fediverse balanced. If it tends to concentrate in a few areas, we might see a tendency to centralize and control.
I personally think it’s not a big deal as long as you could easily move your accounts settings from one account to another.
If anything bad happens to the main instance people will just move elsewhere IMO.
I’d say that federation is the core principle of the network, so centralisation by piling all the users and content onto one server is very undesirable.
(also looking at you, lemmy.world)I really dislike it, the better way would have been randomly choosing one of the mid sized ones.
Same here. One reason why I build my own instances for my friends :)
this is the way.
small instances that can have niche content, owned and operated by those users (think beehaw) but with the ability to consume/interact with content from the rest of the fediverse (onramping).
Great. Are you participating in Lemmy Federate?
any idea how much disk space it costs to join this? like if you have an empty instance, does it add more than 1GB per month?
I created this tool and have been using it in my instance since the very beginning. My instance is almost 2 years old and it’s total database size is 60.2GB.
What people don’t understand about this tool is:
- If a community is generating enough activity, it’s likely that someone from your instance is already following that community.
- If a community isn’t generating enough activity, it won’t create much of a network/storage burden anyway.
Sure, it will make a small difference, but it’s nothing compared to the benefits it provides.
Thank you for the tool and the information!
At least the Lemmy site randomizes the instance list for you.
When I first considered signing up (I think it was on Mastodon), I was told how very easy it would be to move from one instance to another so it wouldn’t matter where I sign up - so I chose the first server that caught my eye. It was also implied that I’d need exactly one login for the entire Fediverse.
In hindsight, I’m okay with this not being true but it was a disappointment. At least moving servers (while taking your history with you) should be a lot easier if we’re trying to avoid big instances becoming bigger.
Very much this. They way it was explained to me was akin to what you are saying, single login, jump servers whenever. In practice it is not that
I’m a shitty developer by all measures but I assume such a feature would be tremendously difficult to implement especially this late in the game. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think so. Like would my username have to be reserved across all instances? Would a new instance have to get some kind of list of known usernames? Where would that even come from? Who knows, not me, that’s for sure
However if it could be done I think that would be a huge selling point. “Imagine if your server started being a shitty place like facebook and you could just move to another without having to nuke your account” is a pretty big deal
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Even if the username changed, having some feature where you can transfer your account and follows, history and notify all to your followers of the new name so their follow list gets updated could be coded, and it would make instance hopping relatively easy.
I’m against reserving your name in all instances but having a feature to change the handle and that all your followers don’t suddenly know who you are is important. Something akin to creating the new one, notifying of the change and leaving the old one directing to the new one for some time.
Or just not letting you swap to an instance if the handle exists. Idk. But this would make me actually start using mastodon if it were a feature. I might even start a fork and work on it.
One universal login via fediverse sounds like a dream. I would love that.
“moving servers” means what exactly? Changing your “home” instance? I assume you can still see content from other instances you’re federated with, right? Otherwise what’s the point
You know how people often assume someone is trolling, simply because their account is new?
Another reason would be to not have a billion dead accounts on servers.
there is a protocol used by HubZilla called zot, it allows for true nomadic identities. where you can even login to your account from any instance.
I don’t think ActivityPub (Protocol that links all mastodon, Pixelfed, lemmy, peertube instances) developpers have any interests in implementing that, or it isn’t so high in their priorities, also to note that ActivityPub developpment has stagnated since its early releases.
In the specific case of Mastodon, an instance pretty much only receives a post via federation if one of its users either follows the creator of that post, or is mentioned in it.
Discoverability suffers, because this also applies to replies to a post even if you follow its poster. You might see them, or you might not. You look at the post history of one of the users in a thread and it comes up empty.
This is not much of a problem if you’re in one of the, say, top five instances, but beyond that, many functions become increasingly unreliable. Instead of one big microblogging ocean, it feels more like an assortment of a few lakes and myriad puddles with only tenuous interconnection.
Personally, I’ve kinda given up on finding (or creating) my One True Instance and am resorting to having profiles on all of the biggest instances. This also has the advantage that arbitrary defederation decisions affect me to a much lesser extent.
IDK if Mastodon has a good way to port accounts but I think its good to have people first join a basic instance and then move to something more specialized once they get used to the platform
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.
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.
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.
When have that happened? Within the fediverse?
Threads tried and failed to do that with mastodon. I think the fediverse is well thought to prevent that even by big actors.
Or even change protocols. Mastodon used to use OStatus before it changed to ActivityPub. And some platforms are multi-protocol, like Hubzilla and Friendica. Whether they are compatible depends on which protocols they have turned on.
Until communities within instances can federate with each other this kind of consolidation is likely inevitable. Though that’s more of a lemmy specific perspective.
Or a Hubzilla, Friendica, or NodeBB perspective, because all of those support discussion groups and forums. And you can participate with them over ActivityPub without using their software or creating an account on their server. I am communicating with your using Hubzilla, not Lemmy right now.
I don’t think it’s a big concern, if a big instance does something stupid people will just move to a different one, and people will also naturally move to instances with communities and moderation policies they prefer over time which will help spread things out
I mean do smaller instances want to be larger? That means more resources. I mean as long as they are accepting signups presumably but they might not be ready for 1000 in a day. For myself I sorta avoided the largest options and then looked at what the next few options put in their about and faq. Until there is a pretty good migration tool though Im not going to get to attached to my user.
If an instance doesn’t want to grow they turn off new sign-ups, some growth might help instances stay afloat, as not only it might help with more donations, but also signal to the maintainers that there is appreciation for their work.
I hope people spread out, but I also hope that tools for viewing the fediverse keep being developed so people don’t feel so fragmented and feel pressured to join big instances.
Like say each instance had a similarly named community, and you could browse the community locally and across all other instance communities with the same name. Much like there is a local and all button at the top.
you could browse the community locally and across all other instance communities with the same name.
Lemmy.ml and lemmy.world political communities wouldn’t probably mix well together. There’s a reason different versions of communities exist. If they are two similar, they should consolidate on one community.
It is difficult because many new users come from centralized experiences and for them it is more natural to simply enter the first instance they find, which will always be Mastodon.social. They may also think that being on smaller instances means less visibility (which I believe is not the case, although I am open to be corrected on this).
I think the ideal would be a kind of recommendation system based on tastes and interests. When you go to the Mastodon site to register, it asks you your main interests and based on those it recommends one or another instance.
I think the ideal would be a kind of recommendation system based on tastes and interests. When you go to the Mastodon site to register, it asks you your main interests and based on those it recommends one or another instance.
https://join-lemmy.org/ does this
