@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.

@design_RG @moonman

@freemo @realcaseyrollins @design_RG you're right but nobody should run an instance that big, it's bad for the network.

@moonman
I agree -- it's good for him to test and support HUGE scale, and dream of migrating the masses.

But it's a shitty user experience there, similar to Twitter. non stop people shouting for attention, mostly being ignored.

@realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social @freemo

@design_RG

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

@freemo
Facebook users on Mastodon, won't be happy at all.

They like Feed Me, the algos showing their familiar things.

Best chance for this kind of users, and fully federated, working, just needs some UI polish -- Friendica.

@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

@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.

@rw

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