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1. Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Nov-2022 20:58:14 JST Aral Balkan

   We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.

   (And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)

   #decentralisation #federation #fediverse #SmallWeb

   • simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Nov-2022 20:58:11 JST simsa04

     in reply to
     Mastodon.social seems to me to become the Twitter of the #fediverse. It's the largest instance and for reasons of #federation it "sees" the most accounts on other servers and draws the most people (mutual reinforcement). Thus for people on m.s. it's much easier to interact with accounts on other servers (all communication occurs "inside" of it) than for users on smaller or more "parochial" instances. The effect is that smaller instances are drowned out in the simultaneity of voices. Add various instance blockings, and the instance with the most (active) accounts wins again. To me m.s. looks far more like a walled garden that you cannot escape than is usually admited in all the self-congratulatory sloganeering of "you can choose any instance you like and interact with everybody you want". The inbalance between large and small instances is detrimental to the later. Perhaps the fediverse should think about means and provisions to counter the negative (but unintended, I'm sure) effects of larger intances.
   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Nov-2022 20:58:13 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.

     Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.

     I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.

     #decentralisation #centralisation #fediverse #SmallWeb

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Nov-2022 23:31:25 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Eugen

     Optimising #Mastodon = designing flows that encourage people to leave mastodon.social for other instances, not accepting any more new members on mastodon.social, and making design changes that limit how much a single instance can scale.

     A single instance that can scale to host hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, is not a design success in decentralisation, it’s a design failure. (It’s a design success in #BigTech.)

     CC @Gargron

     #decentralisation #centralisation #federation

     simsa04 likes this.
   • Nikodemus Siivola 🌈 (nikodemus@kamu.social)'s status on Thursday, 03-Nov-2022 01:38:08 JST Nikodemus Siivola 🌈

     in reply to

     @aral We should have a few BIG landing-pad servers for new people, always.

     "Find a nice server" is an impossible first step.

     "Make an account on any of these big servers, it doesn't matter which. Later when you notice all the most interesting people hang at x.y, move there. No biggie." is what the advice to new users should be, IMO.

     #federation #fediverse #decentralization

     simsa04 likes this.