Aral Balkan
aral@mastodon.ar.al
Myth: The #Fediverse™ Is Decentralised™
I run my own #Mastodon instance just for myself. An instance of one. What does that mean on today’s fediverse?
It means I’m on mastodon.social.
What?
That makes no sense!
Let me explain:
Since I have my own instance, surely I decide who I follow and anyone can follow me, right?
Wrong.
For ~1M accounts, Eugen decides. If he blocks my instance, a large number of people who follow me today will no longer be able to.
So I may as well be on his server.
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Aral Balkan
aral@mastodon.ar.alThe same goes for other large servers.
Look at how many of the people you interact with are on the handful of the largest servers and imagine that just those handful of servers blocked your server.
Come, let‘s take this further…
Apparently Facebook/Meta is “joining” the fediverse. How nice of them. Now imagine that the largest instance is run by Zuckerberg. (Or <insert your favourite Silicon Valley billionaire here>.)
Imagine they become large enough to do the same thing to mastodon.social…
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gettie (
arc) 
getimiskon
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As a recent arrival, it's counterintuitive to me as to why I would move to a smaller server.
I'm sure that's my own ignorance, but if you could explain conceptually why we should spread out, that would probably help with the people like me coming over from Reddit to grasp these new ways of doing.
A video or guidelines or recommendations.
What I found before I came was more descriptive than prescriptive.
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gettie ( arc)
getimiskon
Also, moving to smaller instances can help those larger instances as well. For example, the users there can experience less issues with the service, the moderation will be easier and the cost to run the instance will be lower.
Also, you might want to try another software that provides features that Mastodon doesn't. There are lots of instances out there to try out. For new users, I suggest visiting fediverse.party to see what the fediverse can provide.
@aral
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@getimiskon @aral I was just reading about Meta and this is what happend to me. I left Reddit during the blackout. still happening and i came to mastodon, lemmy and kbin because everyone is doing it. I really don't know what to do now. Meta will destroy the #fediverse period!
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