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@realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social
I've never tested it, but I would expect thast to be the case. As far as I know you cant effectively load balance a cluster of pleorma instances which itself would be a natural upper limit. There will always come some point where a a single server isnt enough.
I agree, M.S isnt where I want to be, but I can see the advantage too.
If everyone migrated today and all your family were on accounts somewhere int he fediverse but otherwise spread out according to their interests, if we kept with the premise of lots of small instances you'd quickly find you couldnt even interact with the majority of your friends and family on the fediverse. From any one server on the fediverse your likely blocking a ton of other servers and simply wont be able to stay in touch.
By having a few massive instances particularly if those instances do not block eachother you are likely to be able to communicate with most of your family and friends, hell they will probably be on the same instance as you.
@moonman @realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social
Strutting small instance self-important sysadmins are a problem. Specially when they go about FediBlock tagging . Annoyance.
As I Blogged about before, the Fediverse reminds me so much of Fidonet.
We had some similar ego clashes, local network insurrections and more. Great fun. 😛
@moonman @realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social
@freemo @design_RG @moonman @realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social I saw an article recently, can immediately place it else I’d link, in which the author was slamming the large instances for essentially centralising what is a decentralised federation. The author couldn’t understand why people flocked to big instances and all I could think of was a Pareto distribution. Added to which, far more people care about numbers than we might like to think. If you want to be an ‘influencer,’ you need a large base of people to influence. For most, joining a large instance seems the simplest route to that.
But the idea that many small instances is potentially bad for the fediverse because it can hamper people’s ability to connect is an interesting point, which I hadn’t considered. I had always uncritically bought the fediverse line that all instances can connect as gospel without thinking on the networking implications of political admins who block nodes, thereby reducing the number of edges in the network.
I started out on M.S because it was the largest instance for exactly the reason you stated.
I quickly became scared my content could be deleted should I make trouble with the moderators and as such didn't trust investing all my time into getting a user base that someone else could take from me.
So ultimately federation gave me the best of both worlds so I started my own server. Now I have 14K+ followers with no fear of anyone being able to take those followers away.
As the admin here I am also very reluctant to take that away from others which is why I try to discuss problems first and use banning as a last resort most of the time.
@design_RG @moonman @realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social
@freemo @design_RG @moonman @realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social your policy around blocking was what attracted me here as some admins are so hyper sensitive.
Out of interest, how does the whole profile forwarding thing work? In that I understood if I fell out with an instance admin I could ‘move’ to another instance an retain my followers - another fediverse mantra I haven’t critically examined. Am I reading your post correctly that an admin could delete my account meaning any forwarding to my new instance wouldn’t work?
Seems two fold, 1) they could delete yoru account preventing you from being able to forward and 2) they could block your intended instance to ensure you can not forward to the instance you wish even if you had an account.
Another reason we have never suspended/blocked an instance (only silenced and only in extream situations).
@design_RG @moonman @realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social
@design_RG
Regardless of what actual software is used, the point is, small instances have disadvantages too. Both large or small instances can be bad for the fediverse in different ways under the current climate.
It would really only be in a world where silencing and suspending of instances is at a minimum that small instances are healthy IMO.
@moonman @realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social