We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.
(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)
Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.
Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.
I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.
@aral decentralisation is key - at the same I argue there's also a minimum for many people to experience a good interaction without have to 100% curate their followers. So 'small' is good - 'nihilistic' less so :-D (disclaimer: I'm an admin of mastodon.nl - currently ~6.5K users)
I grew up in fidonet, a message system between bbs's. You knew your host, and you could call them if you had questions. We could do something like that again. I see that there are regional instances where people can visit and help each other irl.
And is there already such a thing as an automatically unfolding instance? We (you) are all techies here, and for non-tech folks setting up a server can be overwhelming.
Still, I wished Gargron would have pointed the twexodus to other instances.
@StroomAfwaarts @aral TBH - I think there's also a role for understanding journalists to point out that joining a larger instance is not necessarily the best thing to do / there are benefits to more focused/niche instances @laurensvhg
@mdbraber @StroomAfwaarts @aral @laurensvhg I really don't understand this. I joined mastodon.social years ago 'cause it seemed like the easiest option and I keep hearing that there are benefits to other servers, but no mention of those benefits. Surely in a federated system all services are the same?
@danielquinn @mdbraber @StroomAfwaarts @aral not entirely the same: each instance can have its own (blocking) rules. But at the same time you can communicate with people from other instances (like mailing a Hotmail address from your Gmail)
@laurensvhg @danielquinn @mdbraber @StroomAfwaarts @aral
Some instances have some extra features added. For example, the one I'm on has a 65k post size among others. So, unless your instance runs default Mastodon (and that's fine too), it's best to check their about page to see what the modifications are. And rules, of course. And what kind of community they focus on (which is useful for your local timeline).
