Your thoughts on the concentration of users around big and flagship instances ? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by anticurrent@sh.itjust.works to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

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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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[-] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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".

[-] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago

and they are all compatible.

This is not a given. Anyone can fork the protocol. If they are a large enough instance, they can include evil features in their fork, and block any instance that doesn't use that fork. The users of competing forks then don't have access, and their users move to a cooperating instance.

It has happened before; It will happen again.

[-] scott@loves.tech 2 points 1 day ago

Or even change protocols. Mastodon used to use OStatus before it changed to ActivityPub. And some platforms are multi-protocol, like Hubzilla and Friendica. Whether they are compatible depends on which protocols they have turned on.