If the protocol doesn’t give incentives for an even distribution of users, it’s not going to be solved by blaming individual instances or individual users.

It’s inevitable.

It also serves to give new users a stable instance that they can learn on. Then they’ll either switch instances, stay with the biggest, start their own, or abandon federated social media entirely.

But that initial stability gives the best chances of people staying. I started on the big, obvious ones for lemmy and Mastodon. On lemmy, I abandoned my .world account pretty quick for this one because it offered what I need. It ended up being one of the bigger ones, but I don’t plan on switching. But when someone in my life wants to try lemmy, I tend to recommend one of the less annoying instances lol.

Mastodon, it was similar; .social didn’t fill my needs, so I migrated. Twice so far.

There’s always going to be a “biggest” instance. It’s going to be the one that’s easiest to find. You could plug in the smallest instance for Mastodon, and it would decentralize more. But it might also overwhelm that instance. Mastodon in particular has an organization that can maintain a solid instance with massive numbers. Letting it serve as a gateway just makes sense.

The problem isn’t centralization, but the concept of a “generalist” instance. Instances should be more focused in concept and scope, and usable locally without feeling the need to scroll all.

When I first considered signing up (I think it was on Mastodon), I was told how very easy it would be to move from one instance to another so it wouldn’t matter where I sign up - so I chose the first server that caught my eye. It was also implied that I’d need exactly one login for the entire Fediverse.

In hindsight, I’m okay with this not being true but it was a disappointment. At least moving servers (while taking your history with you) should be a lot easier if we’re trying to avoid big instances becoming bigger.

I hope people spread out, but I also hope that tools for viewing the fediverse keep being developed so people don’t feel so fragmented and feel pressured to join big instances.

Like say each instance had a similarly named community, and you could browse the community locally and across all other instance communities with the same name. Much like there is a local and all button at the top.

I think the key to survival and growth of federated platforms is that the onboarding experience for new users be simple and stable. If a new user has to understand what federation is and how it works, then the system is already failing them. Federation needs to be transparent to the fullest extent possible. There’s a lot of value in telling a user “You can sign up on any of these proven-reliable instances, and your choice doesn’t overly matter, because they’re general-purpose and stable, and you’ll still fully interact with users from every other instance either way.” There’s a lot less value in giving them a 30 minute presentation on federation, then overwhelming them with a list of 500 instances to pick from, half of which are hyper-focused on one topic or run by extremists.

At the same time, if they end up being led to an instance that has issues with stability, absent admins, political extremism at the admin-level, or if that instance is topic- or region-specific, or if that instance has defederated from a huge portion of the fediverse, or if that instance just shuts down and stops existing in a few months… Chances are that user’s going to get a bad impression of the platform as a whole, and never come back.

To me it just seems like the instances which don’t offer those issues - the general-purpose instances with long-term support plans, experienced teams, and sane admins - will just naturally end up as big instances, as survival of the fittest. And I don’t see that as an issue at all.

Like, sure, the fediverse is designed around decentralization, but there’s a point where decentralization hurts more than it helps. I don’t think anyone would disagree that if we had maximum decentralization, with every single user self-hosting their own instance, that things would be awful for everyone - and I don’t think anyone would disagree that the opposite, with 100% of users being on one single instance with no alternatives, would also be undesirable. There’s benefit to having consistent user experiences, consistent rules, consistent expectations.

In short, yeah, I think the way forward is having a few flagship general-purpose instances that vacuum up most new users, with a wide plethora of smaller instances that are less general-purpose, or region-specific, or just try out new things with rules and moderation policies.

I do think there should be an extremely simple way (for the end user) to migrate your entire account from one instance to another. Something you could do in just a minute or two.

Dumb

I really dislike it, the better way would have been randomly choosing one of the mid sized ones.

I personally think it’s not a big deal as long as you could easily move your accounts settings from one account to another.

If anything bad happens to the main instance people will just move elsewhere IMO.

I mean do smaller instances want to be larger? That means more resources. I mean as long as they are accepting signups presumably but they might not be ready for 1000 in a day. For myself I sorta avoided the largest options and then looked at what the next few options put in their about and faq. Until there is a pretty good migration tool though Im not going to get to attached to my user.

In the specific case of Mastodon, an instance pretty much only receives a post via federation if one of its users either follows the creator of that post, or is mentioned in it.

Discoverability suffers, because this also applies to replies to a post even if you follow its poster. You might see them, or you might not. You look at the post history of one of the users in a thread and it comes up empty.

This is not much of a problem if you’re in one of the, say, top five instances, but beyond that, many functions become increasingly unreliable. Instead of one big microblogging ocean, it feels more like an assortment of a few lakes and myriad puddles with only tenuous interconnection.

Personally, I’ve kinda given up on finding (or creating) my One True Instance and am resorting to having profiles on all of the biggest instances. This also has the advantage that arbitrary defederation decisions affect me to a much lesser extent.

For threadiverse (lemmy/mbin et al) there’s not much in it. It’s fairly easy for an operator to curate their instance by pre subscribing to a whole bunch of communities. I run my own instance, barely any users and I’m constantly banning and deleting them for advertising. But I have plenty of content.

I made my own mastodon instance and connected to a bunch of groups. Only two or three are active. There’s not really an easy way to get content without following a lot of people. So anyone visiting my instance will see virtually nothing. If they go to social they will see plenty.

So it’s a bit of a no brainer for most I think.

We have to be diligent, and work hard, to keep the fediverse balanced. If it tends to concentrate in a few areas, we might see a tendency to centralize and control.

It is difficult because many new users come from centralized experiences and for them it is more natural to simply enter the first instance they find, which will always be Mastodon.social. They may also think that being on smaller instances means less visibility (which I believe is not the case, although I am open to be corrected on this).

I think the ideal would be a kind of recommendation system based on tastes and interests. When you go to the Mastodon site to register, it asks you your main interests and based on those it recommends one or another instance.

I’d say that federation is the core principle of the network, so centralisation by piling all the users and content onto one server is very undesirable.
(also looking at you, lemmy.world)