Mastodon Monoculture Problem | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon Monoculture Problem

rys.io

19 pointsjorgesumle6 comments

Spanish translation: https://freakspot.net/el-problema-monocultural-de-mastodon/

> The biggest instance, mastodon.social, is home to over 200.000 active accounts as of this writing. This is roughly 1/10th of the whole Fediverse, on a single instance. Worse...

> The biggest instance by far was identi.ca — where I had my account

I mean there you have it. That's the reality of federated systems, everyone likes the idea of a community of small networks that can cross-pollinate but also everyone wants to be on the largest one. I also wont lie, the moderation is why I'm on mastodon.social specifically.

You also have to confront the elephant >.> in the room which is that people are signing up for Mastodon because of Mastodon, not necessarily because of the larger fediverse.

> You also have to confront the elephant >.> in the room which is that people are signing up for Mastodon because of Mastodon, not because of the larger fediverse.

Or more precisely, people are signing up for Mastodon because they're leaving Twitter, and Mastodon is one of the most prominent alternatives. These people are already accustomed to a monolithic monoculture on Twitter and aren't committed to the principles of federation, so they're not bothered by the size of mastodon.social.

> everyone wants to be on the largest one

Nah, everyone wants to quickly discover what's happening, and it's made easier by going to the biggest. Discoverability is a problem that the fediverse has to solve without congregating to the same place

So everyone wants to be on the largest instance. I wasn't implying people wanted it for its own sake.

Whenever your identity is tied to a domain or an organization, why wouldn't anyone just choose the largest? That's likely the one that's going to actually be around the longest and probably the one that's got the budget for the best performing servers.

Without taking the time to research a bunch of obscure servers, I would assume the biggest will be most reliable, perform the best, and be least likely to be involved in a data breach due to any unprofessionalness on the part of admins.

The only way I see to change that is to do what BitTorrent does and make servers just trackers that have nearly zero cost portability between them, and perhaps get rid of trying to decentralize unique human readable handles, that seems to really complicate things.

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