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When posting stats about the number of people (not “users”) joining the fediverse (not “Mastodon”), please also post about the number of instances.
If 400,000,000 people join BigTech.social tomorrow, that’s not a win. That’s how you recreate Twitter.
So let’s focus on what matters. Sure it‘s great that the fediverse is becoming more popular but the character of that popularity matters. How it scales matters. Avoiding corporate capture matters.
@aral Agreed, but I think we need a discussion of how that looks with some specific examples or templates of what the fediverse model can look like. Is it by topic? By groupings? By grouped tags? [I work in #InformationArchitecture, it's tricky 
]
@aral to some extent. Most people need to try it before they can imagine a distributed network. If 400,000,000 people joined tomorrow and 6 months from now many had taken advantage of being able to move to other instances, learned how to set up community servers, and found enough value to invest more time into becoming hosts that would be a huge win. More people connecting away from Musk matters too as does increasing content in the fediverse
@aral also that many users increases the cultural relevance and where engaged dialogs are happening for everyone even if they haven’t fully moved away from big tech, having built in portability means that they don’t need to be in the right spot on day one nor should they be expected to
@aral been spending some time on these numbers. I might have something to share in a few days hopefully. https://social.anantshri.info/@anant/statuses/01GJQK622SNBXCKTE7S2YG3VE6 is one such info that i shared a few days back around different versions in use. Moving towards posts, users, comments, how many single user instances what are the giant instances all those are important questions to be answered and kept in mind.
Wendy 
@aral @rolfkleef het inzicht dat je hierover deelde gisteren, was echt groot! Waarvoor dank.
@aral A bigtech instance wouldn't be too bad though, it would promote the fediverse, which has long-term positive implications. Especially with migration being possible, and 3rd party integrations. If that specific big-tech would do even the slightest wrong, people would jump to other instances quickly.
@wraldpyk @aral The problem with free software maximalism is that the means and the end are often confused.
Do we want *everybody* to be on the fediverse rather than, well, somewhere else? Then massive-scale deployments and minimal friction will be needed.
Do we want to build meaningful connections on social media? Then we may be content with some people just not being here (folks mainly interested in following their favourite pop star can stay on Twitter) and a tolerable amount of friction.
@astrojuanlu @aral yeah it's a good discussion. I don't think a big instance can hurt fediverse too much, but it's not too benefitical either, at least in the short-term. I guess we'll see what happens
@astrojuanlu Ah, you apparently beat me to it. Sorry, only just saw your reply. Yeah, so what Juan said :)
@aral @astrojuanlu yeah that's a good point! I guess I'm too much focussed on the "happy path" I forgot about the not so happy one
@wraldpyk And thankfully they couldn’t embrace, extend, and extinguish because that’s never a thing Big Tech does :)
@aral I heard a lot of people talking about the big instances being an on ramp.
But people never reach consensus so I can't imageine the software or instances continuously growing more consolidated. Unless there's a sudden boost like now. Or maybe I'm not sure what I'm talking about.
@aral I think users is a better description for those figures: I have 6 active user accounts (and 2 dormant/redirecting) so that would be at least 6 in the user count but I am (at least last time I check) only one person and not three weasel people in a trenchcoat.
@aral If join two instances – lots of us do – am I two people?
@aral Let me be negative for a bit:
more than 40% of the total users are on FIVE mastodon instances. In fact, more than 10% are on ONE instance.
That is NOT "decentralised", that is "centralised with minor exceptions".
(Can't say numbers since the-federation.info is ill today.)
@aral That's why I sometimes look at @fediverseobserver to get some decentralisation joy :)
@aral @fediverseobserver Also, there's a limited amount of people living in the region of my regional server so that is a quite clear boundary of the maximum amount of people on our server :)
@aral Very important point. At the same time, we need to be watchful of many smaller instances only posed as independent, when they are actually franchises or affiliated units of one enterprise trying to mask its conglomeration and top-down control. Big tech can federate, too.
@aral Possibly that's the goal for somebody. People who got used to it would like to continue, place doesn't matter.
... and the compare with the hellbird, forever stuck at a single instance ;-D