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Currently, Mastodon is a federation with millions of users on it, and it's been working for many years now. So, it's very clear that it's already worked out.

mumblemumble 6y ago
I think that the point being made was that there's nothing in Mastodon to counteract the natural tendency of people to concentrate in a relatively small number of individual online spaces. A quick eyeball of the English-language instances listed on instances.social, sorted by # of users, would suggest that this is true. There are a couple very large general-purpose instances, but after that it's largely much smaller topical communities. My hypothesis would be that, if one tracked these numbers over time, it would turn out that the larger ones aren't just bigger, they also grow at a faster rate. So, if Mastodon were to grow to the scale of one of the major social networks, we'd also find that the users were mostly all clumped into a single instance that's roughly the size (and level of nastiness) of one of the major social networks. At which point, from a social impact perspective, the fact that Mastodon is, from a technical standpoint, open and federated, would be beside the point.
- yogthos 6y ago
  Clearly there are already multiple large instances in existence, so the situation is already fundamentally better than Twitter where there is only a single instance. Furthermore, I think that small instances are just as important as the big ones. If a small group of people has a shared interest and they want to run an instance in a specific way that's possible to do with Mastodon. There are tons of small Mastodon communities for all kinds of niche interests right now, and their users can make up their own rules for how they interact, what they allow, and so on. This is an incredibly important aspect of the federated model. There isn't one set of rules that applies to everybody the way there is with a centralized platform.
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    Yeah, I guess it's like email. Sure, it's not great that in practice there's only a small number of providers and that it's really hard/scary to run your own, but it's still lightyears better than it being a single company's proprietary messaging system.
    - yogthos 6y ago
      Worth noting that running a Mastodon instance is vastly easier than setting up your own mail server. Digital Ocean even has it provisioned nowadays, so if you wanted to set one up for yourself and friends for example, it's mostly point and click.
      - Vinnl 6y ago
        It currently is, but I can imagine that changing if it were to be as widespread as email, and anti-spam measures are going to take the instance toots are coming from into account.
        yogthos 6y ago
        On the other hand, there might not be a similar incentive to create spam in the first place. I guess we'll see how that develops going forward.

mumblemumble 6y ago

I think that the point being made was that there's nothing in Mastodon to counteract the natural tendency of people to concentrate in a relatively small number of individual online spaces. A quick eyeball of the English-language instances listed on instances.social, sorted by # of users, would suggest that this is true. There are a couple very large general-purpose instances, but after that it's largely much smaller topical communities. My hypothesis would be that, if one tracked these numbers over time, it would turn out that the larger ones aren't just bigger, they also grow at a faster rate. So, if Mastodon were to grow to the scale of one of the major social networks, we'd also find that the users were mostly all clumped into a single instance that's roughly the size (and level of nastiness) of one of the major social networks. At which point, from a social impact perspective, the fact that Mastodon is, from a technical standpoint, open and federated, would be beside the point.

yogthos 6y ago
Clearly there are already multiple large instances in existence, so the situation is already fundamentally better than Twitter where there is only a single instance. Furthermore, I think that small instances are just as important as the big ones. If a small group of people has a shared interest and they want to run an instance in a specific way that's possible to do with Mastodon. There are tons of small Mastodon communities for all kinds of niche interests right now, and their users can make up their own rules for how they interact, what they allow, and so on. This is an incredibly important aspect of the federated model. There isn't one set of rules that applies to everybody the way there is with a centralized platform.
- Vinnl 6y ago
  Yeah, I guess it's like email. Sure, it's not great that in practice there's only a small number of providers and that it's really hard/scary to run your own, but it's still lightyears better than it being a single company's proprietary messaging system.
  - yogthos 6y ago
    Worth noting that running a Mastodon instance is vastly easier than setting up your own mail server. Digital Ocean even has it provisioned nowadays, so if you wanted to set one up for yourself and friends for example, it's mostly point and click.
    - Vinnl 6y ago
      It currently is, but I can imagine that changing if it were to be as widespread as email, and anti-spam measures are going to take the instance toots are coming from into account.
      - yogthos 6y ago
        On the other hand, there might not be a similar incentive to create spam in the first place. I guess we'll see how that develops going forward.