We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.
(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)
Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.
Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.
I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.
Optimising #Mastodon = designing flows that encourage people to leave mastodon.social for other instances, not accepting any more new members on mastodon.social, and making design changes that limit how much a single instance can scale.
A single instance that can scale to host hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, is not a design success in decentralisation, it’s a design failure. (It’s a design success in #BigTech.)
CC @Gargron
PS. This isn’t some new revelation; I’ve been advocating for this from the start :)
@aral Wouldn't a nice start be to go from: how can i run Mastodon (or any other) from ones own computer using that as a server.
if it is all too much of a hassle, you can always host with e.g. @mastohost or Netcup
@aral Maintaining independent instance is still quite an work, there’s need for some infrastructure as code since all instances are relatively similar
@aral
Totally agree. Although if Mastodon gains some more traction there will be people leaving mastodon.social because they find it does not fit their needs.
I for one am on my own server because mastodon.social often feels to left for me.
But decentralisation is key. For the good of the Fediverse and people in general.
We are not built for one monolithic community where everyone is the same.
We are all equal, not the same.
@aral decentralisation is key - at the same I argue there's also a minimum for many people to experience a good interaction without have to 100% curate their followers. So 'small' is good - 'nihilistic' less so :-D (disclaimer: I'm an admin of mastodon.nl - currently ~6.5K users)
I grew up in fidonet, a message system between bbs's. You knew your host, and you could call them if you had questions. We could do something like that again. I see that there are regional instances where people can visit and help each other irl.
And is there already such a thing as an automatically unfolding instance? We (you) are all techies here, and for non-tech folks setting up a server can be overwhelming.
Still, I wished Gargron would have pointed the twexodus to other instances.
@StroomAfwaarts @aral TBH - I think there's also a role for understanding journalists to point out that joining a larger instance is not necessarily the best thing to do / there are benefits to more focused/niche instances @laurensvhg
@mdbraber @StroomAfwaarts @aral @laurensvhg I really don't understand this. I joined mastodon.social years ago 'cause it seemed like the easiest option and I keep hearing that there are benefits to other servers, but no mention of those benefits. Surely in a federated system all services are the same?
@danielquinn @mdbraber @StroomAfwaarts @aral not entirely the same: each instance can have its own (blocking) rules. But at the same time you can communicate with people from other instances (like mailing a Hotmail address from your Gmail)
@laurensvhg @danielquinn @mdbraber @StroomAfwaarts @aral
Some instances have some extra features added. For example, the one I'm on has a 65k post size among others. So, unless your instance runs default Mastodon (and that's fine too), it's best to check their about page to see what the modifications are. And rules, of course. And what kind of community they focus on (which is useful for your local timeline).
@aral I agree. I’m new to this and I’m studying the concept, but the end goal is to create my own instance. I’m just thinking with what community/topic in mind.
@aral this makes sense, and is incidentally something I was thinking about this morning too.
https://scholar.social/@badri/109273595283228563
Does it say something that I took "we should get people off mastodon.social" as an established fact rather than a new revelation? 
@aral I didn't get to the extreme of "one person, one server" but I am considering setting up a Mastodon instance for my family so there's that 
If I were to set up a single-person instance, I'd probably look for some lighter implementation than Mastodon (not that Mastodon is bad, but I personally don't mind even a less polished experience if it saves on resources and I'm guessing something geared to few users would be more efficient in that field).
@aral I wonder resource wise what’s more efficient, less big servers or lots of little ones.
That said there are plenty of other things that waste energy about
️ @aral is your position still 1 instance per user, or has it changed over time? I've just seen that toot from 2017.
@aral I have to agree. Not that we should make it "impossible" to have instances beyond a certain size, but it's better to have more instances than to have big instances that "work". Making the big instance more efficient is only good, if it helps making it easier for people to start their own small instance.
@aral honestly I think it would help to make it easier to move from one instance to another, and then make it easier to host your own instance.
@aral @Gargron I'm new to mastodon today. I think that makes sense, but it's a pretty big hurdle to figure out which community makes sense on day 1, so I went with the default knowing I can move later. The community belonging concept feels tough to me right now as I exist and want to communicate in multiple communities, and I'm not sure how I would decide to join one today if targeted communities existed for all of my interest areas.
@aral @Gargron as a recent escapee from #twitter it was helpful to have a wide-open mastodon.social that has accepted me until I find my footing and figure out where my people are. Many I meant to follow went to instances that are now full. Having a (temporary) central clearing house might be useful though I see the sense in encouraging it to stay temporary.
@aral @ralf @Gargron You know what would be cool? To have a website or tool that is a vertical bar which represents the fediverse or mastodon. One pole is 1 user per instance, the other end is all users on one instance (aka Twitter). By counting users per instances across the fediverse, this would allow to have a graphical representation of the level of distribution/federation at any time.
It implies also making interoperability between servers seemless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33426897
You can feel the problems even as a tech enthusiast... and get used to it so you don't view it as a big problem.
But normal people who are not tech enthusiasts are less likely to go through that effort and have a more difficult process
@eprenen @aral Yes, that's the sad reality. Convincing someone to sign up on a server hosted by someone else (especially a recognizable non-profit) is much easier than convincing them to get into self-hosting. Many people are neither capable nor willing (although SaaS offerings help, any hosting cost is a hurdle not to be discounted). We need scalable servers for the masses. Luckily the system supports both use cases.
@aral @gargron An arbitrary cap seems, well, arbitrary, but I would like to think there's some kind of strategy for avoiding the #LongTail trap. One #Fediverse health check that might be useful is an ongoing #bot-conducted #survey and periodic reports of the #distribution of #instance headcount.
@aral @Gargron By this criterion, recent developments have optimised a lot! In the last week we've had almost 200k new users, only 6k new users in a month on mastodon.social.
https://fedidb.org/network/instance?domain=mastodon.social
@aral I wouldn't be so categorical.
> A single instance that can scale to host hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people
means that running an instance for couple thousands or hundreds people is becoming way cheaper, and as a result, more accessible.
This is the exact problem that, for instance, Matrix has. It's voracious, and a nightmare to work with, so just anyone from the street can't afford to host it. Whereas XMPP servers like ejabberd or Prosody can serve tens of thousands of users from a matchbox computer like rPi. So I can be confident that they will handle my needs easy-peasy.
And Mastodon as well is such a beast, that code optimization is way overdue. I think we should welcome it when the software is trying to get better, not bash its creator for it.
you can't have features for free - e.g. Matrix Servers surely can be optimized a lot, but you will never scale as good with #users or #sentMessages because Matrix simply does more things.
@aral @Gargron how do you think the discovery problem should be handled in a small web perspective? The thing Twitter (and Big Tech in general) does really well is to solve that problem, and I don't see a great answer on Mastodon except for directories of individuals... Of which there are multiple in various states of maintenance.
The fact that we can have small hosted servers for less than a blue tick on Twitter would cost should be promoted more.
But, at that level of granularity, being able to see more information about other people on other servers would be useful. As would a posts import tool to help with the migration. That could be enabled by admins so it is really just something used by small instances.
@simon @samdeane @aral @Gargron "small hosted servers for less than a blue tick on Twitter" is a great advertisement! 
cc: @mastohost
@aral @Gargron Sorry, but that's naive in my opinion. When people decide to leave Twitter (yay!) and look for alternatives, Fediverse tech should just work! We only saw a 0.something percentage of Twitter users migrate to Mastodon and even this relatively small amount of users caused problems (and not only on Mastdon.social). Yes, big instances may cause problems in terms of centralization or concentration, but why not focus on the opportunity to show people that Fediverse is working 
@kraehenpost Maybe it’s naïve, maybe it’s ~ a decade of thinking about the problem ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(It comes down to your definition of “working.” If we manage to recreate twitter.com on mastodon.social, I wouldn’t define that as “working” but as “failed.”)
@aral @Gargron I disagree somewhat; yes, scaling well is an L for decentralization, but it is a W for the freedom of hosters.
What if you want to use #Mastodon to host your own centralized platform? #TruthSocial is a good example of this; #Trump aside, it's awesome that you can use #Mastodon to both be part of a huge network, make your own network, or make a standalone social site.
@specktator_ Been saying it for a while ;)
ActivityPub uses domains for identification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion
@guysoft I'm familiar with the issue but I think is not much of an problem regarding mastodon instances. The network has almost 4k instances already (and keep counting) which can host a fair user amount. Also, the IPv6 roll out is not great but it's working fairly well for now. Imho there's no big problem either on creating new instances or hosting current user flows at the moment. The only problem I find is the one of allocating and spreading the users across instances.
@aral