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
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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.
Edit: The concept is known as “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
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.
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
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.