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

  • @[email protected]English
    3•2 years 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”.

    • @[email protected]
      2•2 years 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.

      • @[email protected]
        1•3 days ago

        So if any instance becomes evil people just have to seamlessly move away.

        The bad assumption here is that everyone knows about the wrongdoings of an admin. When the power is abused, the masses don’t know to move. The mastodon.social admins arbitrarily block whoever expresses a viewpoint they oppose. The thousands of users who that power affects are mostly unaware. The rest are too lazy to move.

        The mastodon.social instance /is/ evil. Yet people have not moved away.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•2 years 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.