stuart
@Bloomfer @Tony @maegul @arinbasu1 Have to differ with you as a veteran of this war which was won by the little people against the megacorps and a corrupt management only two years ago: https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/15/nominet_second_agm/
The major beneficiary was not us but the public.
We hopefully, will never get into the same position with Mastodon/ActivityPub but always be prepared. I need smarter guys than me to be watching, advising and, if necessary, warning.
Hunter S. Bloomfer
stuart
@Bloomfer @Tony @maegul @arinbasu1 Anybody who can spin up an Apache/Nginx instance can proxy it for you. Opposite of centralisation which is the whole point of being here.
'Free' tiers of commercial providers tend to go non-free over time. Hence use 'em when free but build an independent alternative. for later
Do we need for some sort of Trade Union for us little instances - to challenge any decisions the majors might make that effectively isolates or makes second class netcitizens of us?
Hunter S. Bloomfer
stuart
@Bloomfer @Tony @maegul @arinbasu1 That's a reducing issue these days as IPv6 becomes more prevalent as it is (with the UK providers I've worked with) effectively gives a fixed large range. You need to use Cloudflare or other CDM to proxy it for IPv4 users but that's free for small instances.
More to the point Mastodon is reportably difficult to install without a IPv4 connection. But that should be fixable by the developers. Hopefully soon.
Hunter S. Bloomfer
stuart
@Bloomfer @Tony @maegul @arinbasu1 Certainly not. I'm advocating against monolithic instances. I'm thinking along the choices non-IT people have with, say, WordPress. A multiplicity of hosters offering managed solutions including a domain or sub-domain.
People who have a #RaspberryPi and a decent broadband connection, on the other hand, also have scripts and videos to get them going. Great for a personal instance. Most will have the required skills (or the #RPi will still be in the drawer ;-)
Hunter S. Bloomfer
stuart
@arinbasu1 @Tony @Bloomfer @maegul @admin Adding to this even experienced SysAdmins who celebrated getting their Mastodon instance running (not without incident) suddenly hit the harder problem of getting it to federate successfully. Six months on I'm only just succeeding - yesterday we only hit 50% of known instances. This required extra software.
Running your own instance is great and rewarding. But be careful of building unrealistic expectations, fragile servers and disappointing results.
stuart
@arinbasu1 @Tony @Bloomfer @maegul I run a small instance as @admin. Running your own independent server or vps does require basic SysAdmin skills (and mindset). People who do will almost certainly have a domain or three so adding on a 'social' subdomain and point it at the server is trivial and free.
Reducing that to an app is imho a pipedream. More promising is a hoster offering a managed vps with Mastodon or whatever as a service. Taking responsibility for backups and managing data storage.
Arin
Yes, but even then, mostly from first hand experience of people trying to install. Much of that is about apprehensions of “shall I? shall not I?”
Arin
Always is! Sorry, I meant, it should not be more difficult than installing an app. But then again, it’s interesting to watch how many people struggle to install apps.
Hunter S. Bloomfer
Hunter S. Bloomfer
Arin
This is the ideal scenario for decentralisation. Love this concept.
Mr. Bacon
Hunter S. Bloomfer
maegul
Fedidb records ~21k instances.
Which means that ~20% of the fediverse users not on the core/central 150 instances are spread out amongst ~20,000 instances.
I'm guessing many of these are self-hosting, but it'd be very interesting to look through all of the data to get a clear picture.
Otherwise, there are probably many small community instances out there ... which is awesome!
maegul
An additional observation on MAU to User ratios.
Of 150 largest instances (min 8k users, extent of my "analysis"), the MAU/Total User ratio had no relationship with the total user count. Said ratio varies from 0-40% with outliers 48, 53, 75%.
Though, all high MAU ratio instances are small.
That is: all >30% MAU ratio instances have ~30k or fewer users. So small instance community is probably working well, but not reliably so?
maegul
Also, depending on what counts as "large" (>10k users?), 70-80% of fediverse is probably on large instances, which must have implications for federating/moderating with safety in mind.
If you were admining an instance that cares about safety, when do you start with the "federate" list rather than "defederate" list and ignore all the big ones (>20k?)
Anyone doing this sort of analysis properly? Could #fedidb include such?
/end
maegul
Big surprise for me was how much mastodon.social is growing (especially given the tension about its dominance).
It's current trend is to grow by the equivalent of the 23rd largest instance per month while most (ie largest) instances are growing by 2% per month (ie a few thousand, which, guessing, would be something like the 300th largest instance or so ... ie small).
/2
maegul
@fediversenews
So poking around fedidb.org, I thought I'd do some back-of-napkin analysis (ie procrastination).
* 50% of #fediverse users are on the largest 20 instances
* ~50% of MAU are on the largest 28
* 77% users are on instances with >10k users (largest 130)
* 73% MAUs on >10k instances
* Of largest 20 instances, user growth/mnth (trend over prev 3mnths) is ~1-2% ... with 2 major outliers:
- misskey.io: 30% (See @atomicpoet to follow the *key story)
- #mastodon.social(!!): 5%
/1
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.