Aral Balkan
Mastodon is decentralised.
I have 45,465 followers on my single-person instance.
Of those, 13,180 are on mastodon.social.
So roughly 30% of my followers are on mastodon.social.
Also, I follow 11,392 people.
Of those, 1,864 are on mastodon.social.
If mastodon.social blocks my instance, I lose 30% of my followers and I’m forced to stop following 1,864 people.
If my instance blocks mastodon.social, I lose 30% of my followers and I’m forced to stop following 1,864 people.
Mastodon is decentralised.
Aral Balkan
@jens This. :110:
Been bloody trying to get people to understand this for ages.
Why have I spent the last six years building so much fucking infrastruture for the Small Web? Because this.
Jens Finkhäuser
@aral Mind you, it's difficult to decentralise when your tech stack begs for centralization 🤷♂️
Jens Finkhäuser
@aral I've limited it for a while, didn't hurt.
Aral Balkan
@martijn This is also true.
If only web hosts were more interoperable. Hopefully we’ll be able to build a good abstraction layer for Domain for this on the Small Web although I’m starting out with Hetzner too because it’s the easiest to use (API) and excellent value for money (we need to charge for the servers but I don’t want us or others to charge so much that it’s untenable for people. Maybe once we’ve proven the model works we can get governments/EU to take their heads out of their asses and support us from the common purse. Given what I’ve seen in the last decade with politicians and the EU, I’m not holding my breath for that and nor am I basing the system on it.)
Sexybiggetje🐖
@aral even worse. If you block hetzner or they go down for some reason, you probably loose 98% haha
Aral Balkan
@mastodonmigration It’s decentralised in the sense that email is decentralised.
In other words, in the sense where if Gmail marks you as spam, you’re spam.
Decentralisation is about power differentials (or, more accurately, the lack thereof.)
Mastodon Migration
Well, in the sense that it is 'only' 30%, it is indeed decentralized. But you make a great case for mastodon.social folks (or mastodon.online for that matter) moving to smaller independent instances, or as you have done creating their own. Pretty cool to have the option to do so.
Mastodon Migration
No argument. Have been writing about this a lot within the context of Bluesky's claims about being decentralized. There are two aspects to 'decentralization', one the technical structure of the network, and second the actual user distribution and commensurate power differentials. A decentralizable network where users are all consolidated on one node, is not decentralized at all. Or, as you point out, in the case of Mastodon (and email), only imperfectly decentralized.
Aral Balkan
@mastodonmigration I would express it differently: if a network has economies of scale baked in, it is centralised, even if you don’t know it yet. So it was with the web, so it is with email, and ditto for ActivityPub/Mastodon. Federation is better than nothing but there is nothing in the protocol or in its big-tech stack implementations in the popular clients to prevent centralisation. The best tool we had was social pressure and that lever was summarily disposed of early on when the only folks who could have used it decided not to.
Mastodon Migration
Love your perspectives on this. In particular, that decentralization or more accurately the degree of centralization is about power, not purely technological feasibility. And further, that the technology can serve to facilitate real user decentralization or not. In this context the default .social is an anti-decentralization technological implementation, and @stux recommendation of a short list is a decentralization enabler. Or course that means willfully distributing power.
Aral Balkan
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