There's a claim going around that Mastodon is "centralizing around a few instances" because 1% of instances account for 84% of users. https://mathstodon.xyz/@manlius/109383027753990134

That's misleading. 1% of instances is ~360. That's a lot more than I expected! Impressively decentralized.

Measuring centralization as a % doesn't make sense. Hypothetically, if 100K new people each started their own instance, centralization as measured by this stat would greatly *increase*, even though that's not what actually happened.

Manlio De Domenico (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Again, a quick and dirty analysis, but if I have no bugs then the 1% largest #Mastodon instances accounts for 84% of all users. The top 5% accounts for 97% of all users. We can say that the system is effectively centralizing around a few instances, and this might be a problem for the overall stability and sustainability. @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] #MastoStat #ComplexSystems

Mathstodon
@randomwalker But totally agreed that % of instances is the wrong way to put this.
@eckles Sorry about that! I didn't see that comment thread and got the 36K figure from instances.social.
@randomwalker But yeah totally agree with your point that this is a good number of instances and that's what's important