It's interesting to see the web3/blockchain champions trying to cope with the organic model of the #Fediverse (or “Web for Workgroups 3.11” as I like to call it <https://sociale.network/@oblomov/109329285147073786>) and kind of missing the point due to a combination of expectations and misplaced assumptions. Consider the thread here:
<https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1593099887457210369>. There is a correct remark about the distribution of users (~50% active users are in one instance), but everything else is wrong.

The biggest misconception is about the federation mechanism itself: in the #Fediverse there is no “structural pipe”; federation is essentially defined in terms of “flow”, i.e. cross-talk and cross-server follows and boosts. Cross-server user interactions are not “weak ties”, they _define_ peerage.
This fundamental misunderstanding seems to be at the basis of all the assumptions made on the structure of the Fediverse peerage graph.

Just to make an example, I'm a nobody following barely more than 100 accounts, and those accounts are from 60 different servers. If also look at the people following me, the number goes up to _at least 75_ (I'd have to write a script to get the full list of followers and I'm lazy). So my instance peers with _at least_ 75 different other instances, most likely much more (just looking at the federated timeline I see accounts from at least 3 other servers).

Of course among the accounts I interact with there's a plurality from mastodon.social, followed by other major instances, but the distribution is has again a “long tail” not unlike that of the general distribution of the #Fediverse population. In fact, even better, because the only two instances with more than 10 followed accounts take up only ~27% of my follows. So the infamous #longTail actually _improves_ with the peering!

And this is only the peering set up by the “follow” mechanism. One of the objections was the lack of “serendipity”, but IME even the Home timeline _alone_ gives plenty of serendipity because of _boosts_, especially if you follow some very active booster, since you end up receiving content from servers on which _they_ follow someone, or some of _their_ followers follows someone, or (etc). And of course, if that's not enough, you can always expand your view with the federated timeline.