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Yeah, though as we can see from experience of Gab being the biggest Mastodon instance and Mastodon not having collapsed, it's possible to have an alternative without it necessarily becoming a "witch town".

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Gab left the fediverse quite a while ago now:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/ie49qp/is_gab_sti...

I don't think they ever really cared about decentralisation/federation. Seems they just wanted a nice codebase to work from.

My main point is that Mastodon survived the ordeal.

It wasn't hard when all the big apps and most of the big instances blocked it between the announcement and launch. The instances that didn't block it mostly looked like Gab anyway.

I'd take the claim that Gab was "the biggest Mastodon instance" with a pinch of salt, to be honest.

Plus, they were immediately and almost universally banned by other instances in the fediverse

Yes, while technically true, it's only due to the way that they arrived vs the way the rest of the Mastodon federation grew.

Gab broke/removed the code for federation several months ago, so they're no longer part of the fediverse. See my reply to your GP for more details.

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