Aral Balkan@bnjbvr 7 billion people each having their own instance of one/encrypted personal node (and thus having ownership and control over their entire selves and thereby having the integrity of their personhood encapsulated and intact) is actually the ultimate success state of a peer to peer world. It’s the utopia we’re aiming for.
Eden@aral @bnjbvr where would you recommend the best explanations of #instances? There's a lot to learn, and it's something that outside of the fediverse I haven't seen at all.
@eevb @bnjbvr Instances are servers. The closest analogy is email. While mastodon.social may be like Gmail, sans the evil business model, in that it is a very large server, anyone can run their own email server because, like email, Mastodon is based on an open protocol and the codebase itself is free and open source. So I run an instance just for myself (“an instance of one”). That brings it a step closer to resembling a peer-to-peer system.
@eevb @bnjbvr But, sadly, the trend in multi-tenant designs is towards centralisation. We saw this with email, the Web (where a web server is an “instance”), and we are seeing it with Mastodon too. The complexity and resource overheads of multi-tenant designs create economies of scale that incentivise centralisation. Federation is a good stop gap but if we want a peer-to-peer world, we must transition to single-tenant designs where every node is equal.
@eevb @bnjbvr (On the latter point, see https://social.wxcafe.net/@ngaumont/100599405748162389 for discussion on the Gini index of Mastodon and the current ratio of instances to accounts – both of which paint a very centralised picture, as expected of a multi-tenant design.)
ngaumont (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] There is already a stat page computing the centralisation of mastodon instances [1]. It uses the gini index and shanon entropy to evaluate the concentration of user in instances. @[email protected] made it [1] http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/general