Why isn't ActivityPub more peer-to-peer? Like, it's all in a few dominant nodes (eg: mastodon). Shouldn't it be 1000s of little nodes (community) or individual publishers?
Mind you, per capita France and Germany also have way more servers than the USA. Interesting.
What definitely does is that the major European server providers tend to be located in one of those two countries (like OVH or Hetzner). Note that server location != user location, users could be anywhere in Europe without a noticeable latency.
Doesn't make any sense for me to pay for a server located in my country when I can find one in Germany with an order of magnitude better performance for the price.
They lead many tech stats per capita. Another example is the amount of French and German wikipedia pages, patents, research, internet penetration, renewable energy …
A shame that the focus on car manufacturing for so long cannibalised the software business. I think it could have been a software powerhouse, but was/is not focussing at all on it outside of some shining outliers.
That's the main reason I'm not on it personally: It feels lame to just join the biggest instance, but none of the smaller instances really seem to "click", and I'm not really so keen that I want to run my own instance.
Having One Obvious Choice to join to begin with is the best thing federated services can do to encourage wider adoption.
I think people exaggerate how massive a decision this is. When the news that Twitter might be bought by a naughty melon broke, I revived an old mastodon.online account that I'd created back during a _previous_ Twitter scandal, used that for a bit, then moved to mastodon.ie. Moving is, generally, reasonably easy. Now there are edge-cases; your instance might just _go away_, say. But generally you can't go too far wrong by initially selecting one of the big ones and then moving as and when.
That's only an "edge case" if you don't actually gaf about maintaining your account URI/content/social graph/etc. over time. "The Fediverse" is a bad joke.
Last I checked, the Western or European parts of Fediverse had since been trying hard to distance, obscure, dilute and fight Japanese anime content, without much success. I suspect that's where your felt barrier comes from.
For others reading this, numpad0 means pedophilic anime content.
It was also clear that the European parts were pretty upset, if not felt threatened, about the volume and growth of Japanese users. They came in numbers, they speak languages most don't understand, they post content most aren't interested in, they themselves aren't interested in following European laws -
well, that kind of sound like certain kinds of problem that happens IRL...
e: also, however anyone frames it, it won’t change the fact that they put a lot of effort to keep networks segragated and fractured, rather than the whole unified and distributed.
The decision isn't really that massive, a lot of users have alt accounts on different servers and it's not that difficult to migrate between them.
If you've never used the fediverse before, you don't really know that, do you? I've heard of the "move your account" functionality before, but I don't really think until today I had anyone say to me, "Look, don't worry too much about which server you choose to start out with -- just pick one, because it's super-easy to switch later if you want to try a different one."
> What could federated services do that would make the obvious choice not feel lame?
I admit this is an inconsistency on my part, and probably only limited to people a lot like me: on the one hand, the whole promise of federation is that you can avoid massive centralization; so joining the One Biggest Instance seems kind of pointless. On the other hand, I don't want to join a random small instance which may not be well-maintained; and I don't want to join an instance which is going to pigeon-hole me ("A mastodon instance for developers!" "A mastodon instance for Christians!").
There are different parts of my brain that all want different things, each of which vetoes any particular decision. But this is very much what the "paradox of choice" is about: in many cases, having more options makes you less happy.
I do think it was good that Mastodon embraced this in a way that earlier federated options didn't (e.g., I believe at some point diaspora stopped new sign-ups to their main instance to "encourage federation"; from my perspecitve it encouraged was people to go elsewhere.)
So "what could federated services do better" to solve the paradox of choice? Nothing as far as I can tell -- if you want more choice, you're going to have the paradox of choice; Mastodon at least has already done the only thing I can think of which mitigates it somewhat.
I think that's fair, the resources around joining don't make this particularly clear. Part of the problem is that 'Mastodon' as an organization is not very invested in making this widely known, they would rather people stick with the easy choice because they run mastodon.social. For people who are already on the network it's pretty well understood.
It is listed on this page, at the very bottom (facepalm) - https://joinmastodon.org/servers
This is a better resource if you want more information on it - https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-anot...
I do think there's a paradox of choice issue going on and I can understand why that makes it more intimidating to try it out. One thing that I wish was more widely known is that you can just create an account on multiple servers. If you're not sure you'll like the vibe of a server, create an account and try it, you can either migrate that account or delete it if you decide that server isn't for you. I hope this perspective might make people feel more curiosity and less decision paralysis, it's not a problem to have alt accounts.
> I think that's fair, the resources around joining don't make this particularly clear.
It's also not actually super-easy to switch later.
It'll be interesting to (if that ever happens) see whether bluesky, once it actually becomes a decentralized system instead of a closed one, shakes out differently due to protocol differences, or broadly follows the same patterns.
If*
Everything must be copied over to your server first. Let me say that again: You only see data that is stored on your local instance.
So likes, profiles, replies, etc are all very limited, since your server only stores them from people you follow (since you’re the only user).
Not only this, but this works in reverse aswell. Only servers that know of your existence will see your posts. If no one is following you, only people (and people on their server) you directly reply to will see your posts.
As such, being in a self-hosted instance or small community can be extremely isolating and make it hard to really network with other people outside of the circle that is already around you.