@louis@emacs.ch Sadly, Eugen has allowed himself (and mastodon.social) to become a centre. Mastodon was already built on a Big Web stack, inheriting its scaling characteristics and inherent success criteria so the only hope was for social pressure to keep instances small. And that’s clearly not happening. Instead he’s going for vertical scale. And, sadly, Eugen’s going to discover the hard way (and very soon) that a German not-for-profit cannot compete with Silicon Valley on that.
@louis@emacs.ch Mastodon.social will be dethroned as the largest instance within roughly a year (and almost overnight) by Tumblr or Mozilla or some other Silicon Valley entrant. At that point Eugen will have zero recourse but to accept it because he’s already made giant instances socially acceptable. In time, he’ll likely be brought into the fold as Tim Berners-Lee was by the Big Web and maybe eventually launch an initiative to Reclaim the Fediverse. It’s not like we haven’t seen this before.
@ctietze @louis@emacs.ch This.
@aral @ctietze @louis You are having a strong conversation here. I can't blame Eugen for wanting to make #Mastodon more successful. But he probably hit the wall of user interests: It's more promising to make it easy for users to board on than to educate them. Because some don't want to be educated.
On the other hand we probably know: Many educated people already using Mastodon are not easy to socialize with. So it might be Eugen is trying to fight a social problem with algorithms once again.