Recent searches
Search options
Mastodon is decentralised.
I have 45,465 followers on my single-person instance.
Of those, 13,180 are on mastodon.social.
So roughly 30% of my followers are on mastodon.social.
Also, I follow 11,392 people.
Of those, 1,864 are on mastodon.social.
If mastodon.social blocks my instance, I lose 30% of my followers and I’m forced to stop following 1,864 people.
If my instance blocks mastodon.social, I lose 30% of my followers and I’m forced to stop following 1,864 people.
Mastodon is decentralised.
@aral even worse. If you block hetzner or they go down for some reason, you probably loose 98% haha
@martijn This is also true.
If only web hosts were more interoperable. Hopefully we’ll be able to build a good abstraction layer for Domain for this on the Small Web although I’m starting out with Hetzner too because it’s the easiest to use (API) and excellent value for money (we need to charge for the servers but I don’t want us or others to charge so much that it’s untenable for people. Maybe once we’ve proven the model works we can get governments/EU to take their heads out of their asses and support us from the common purse. Given what I’ve seen in the last decade with politicians and the EU, I’m not holding my breath for that and nor am I basing the system on it.)
@aral @martijn Yes, anyone (including me) can easily fall into that trap. Convenience (low cost, ease of use, etc.) unfortunately often leads to hidden dependencies and a concentration on a few infrastructure and toolset providers somewhere down in the tech stack.
But even though decentralization will probably never be 100%, it always makes sense to think about it, try it, and be aware of it.
@aral I've limited it for a while, didn't hurt.
@aral Mind you, it's difficult to decentralise when your tech stack begs for centralization 
@jens This. 
Been bloody trying to get people to understand this for ages.
Why have I spent the last six years building so much fucking infrastruture for the Small Web? Because this.
@aral Yes, I know.
It's why I have given up on the Web entirely. But I'm simultaneously very glad for your work, because I really do think we need all the options from "how to do better right now" to "what would something look like that's fundamentally different?".
@aral@mastodon.ar.al Flagship instances (or any instance tbh) should be size limited imho. As in, they should close registrations after they hit a certain size.
Like, it'd be a lot healthier for the fediverse if we had a larger quantity of smaller instances instead of a couple of big ones.
The realization of this is the biggest reason why I keep advocating for people to host their own instances and is also why I stopped using my old hachyderm account and made this one.
Well, in the sense that it is 'only' 30%, it is indeed decentralized. But you make a great case for mastodon.social folks (or mastodon.online for that matter) moving to smaller independent instances, or as you have done creating their own. Pretty cool to have the option to do so.
@mastodonmigration It’s decentralised in the sense that email is decentralised.
In other words, in the sense where if Gmail marks you as spam, you’re spam.
Decentralisation is about power differentials (or, more accurately, the lack thereof.)
@nanook @mastodonmigration > gmail has ZERO impact on whether or not I am spam, except on Gmail.
My point exactly.
@aral @mastodonmigration maybe it'd be a good idea writing about that from time to time, and especially the possibility of migration and how to do that.
Many people cone to Mastodon through the default and remain there because forget/don't know/think it is too difficult migrating.
No argument. Have been writing about this a lot within the context of Bluesky's claims about being decentralized. There are two aspects to 'decentralization', one the technical structure of the network, and second the actual user distribution and commensurate power differentials. A decentralizable network where users are all consolidated on one node, is not decentralized at all. Or, as you point out, in the case of Mastodon (and email), only imperfectly decentralized.
@mastodonmigration I would express it differently: if a network has economies of scale baked in, it is centralised, even if you don’t know it yet. So it was with the web, so it is with email, and ditto for ActivityPub/Mastodon. Federation is better than nothing but there is nothing in the protocol or in its big-tech stack implementations in the popular clients to prevent centralisation. The best tool we had was social pressure and that lever was summarily disposed of early on when the only folks who could have used it decided not to.
Love your perspectives on this. In particular, that decentralization or more accurately the degree of centralization is about power, not purely technological feasibility. And further, that the technology can serve to facilitate real user decentralization or not. In this context the default .social is an anti-decentralization technological implementation, and @stux recommendation of a short list is a decentralization enabler. Or course that means willfully distributing power.
@mastodonmigration @aral @stux @wjmaggos interesting approach. We could probably measure the cutoff point where "50%" of users are reached. (Yes we can't know the whole Fediverse, but as an approximation this would still be interesting)
Examples:
Let's say there are 5000 users, but the top 7 servers make up 50% of users. -> 5000/7 -> 714x centralised.
50000 users, 7 servers reach 50%+ -> 50000/7 -> 7143x centralised.
@mastodonmigration @aral @stux @wjmaggos importantly: the score gets worse as the network grows **unless** the growth is in the "back half".
@mastodonmigration @aral @stux @wjmaggos
Network with 150 Million users, single server. Obviously that single server is 50%+ of users. Score: 150 Million times centralised.
@mastodonmigration @aral @stux @wjmaggos starting an additional instance does not make the network more decentralised by itself. It must attract users *without* becoming one of the largest servers itself. If it becomes one of the top servers, it might even make the score worse.
@mastodonmigration @aral @stux @wjmaggos With numbers from https://fedidb.com/ currently, it looks like there are
1.084.179 active accounts on 27.743 servers. The latter number does not matter much.
From the servers list, we can see that the top 16 servers would each 543,5K users - over 50%.
So the fediverse's score according to this dataset would currently be 1084179÷16 or 67761x centralised.
@mastodonmigration @aral @stux @wjmaggos imagining a world where each server has exactly 10 users, this number would be "20". In a world with only single-user instances, we would reach 50% at 50% of the servers, so the best possible score here is "2".
@claudius @mastodonmigration @aral @stux @wjmaggos With this method, assuming we go by Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and use the data from FediDB, The fediverse score is
27423/24 ≈ 1143
Data source: https://fedidb.com/servers
The top 24 Servers account for ~ 50% of all MAUs.
@sheogorath @mastodonmigration @aral @stux @wjmaggos first number is users, not servers. https://darmstadt.social/@claudius/114569419167473014
@sheogorath @mastodonmigration @aral @stux @wjmaggos but also: this is by no means a standard, and there might be better (or more established) ways already.
@claudius @mastodonmigration @aral @stux @wjmaggos Ah,m that changed behind the scenes :D
In that case it would be 1.2M/24
@aral i wish this was wrong, but at the same time I can't think of anything that would disprove it. 
@aral @mastodonmigration
I have seen this with my family's email host, it got marked as spam by Microsoft, and that was the end of things for several members of my family; they had to abandon their family email addresses.
@mastodonmigration @aral I've said this till I'm blue in the face, but Eugen should implement the already-written code for importing content archives into Activity Pub.
Better account migration would encourage a lot more people to move around and explore the fedi until they find their ideal home here. Fine to have an "on-boarding" server if newcomers don't get stuck there because they can only migrate followers.
Eugen just doesn't seem to as committed to decentralization as he claims.
@aral I think that the issue with decentralization is that it forces end users to care about technical implementation, which a lot of users don't want to do. I'm yet to see a full solution to that problem.
AuthN/AuthZ throws the biggest spanner in the works, although I'm not sure it really needs to, at least for AuthN, considering that, outside of marketing, the only reason to supply an email address is for "I forgot my password" purposes.
Just thinking out loud, I'm sure you know all this.
@aral it reminds me of how the argument Eugen used against the "local only" post visibility feature was that it'd be a centralizing force. Says the strongest centralizing force in the fediverse...
@aral ... but you won't lose 100% of them.
A few months ago, I discovered that some people have *very* strong opinions about their Mastodon instance and get *very* upset if you suggest looking at alternatives.
@aral@mastodon.ar.al ehhh honestly not that bad, 30% being on mastodon.social kinda sucks but all things considered these numbers are vastly better than anything else on the internet right now for social media
we should totally work on making mastodon.social less shitty and centralized still, if not for anything else, at least for the benefit of the users/network