Mastodawn

Arvind Narayanan Nov 21, 2022

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

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Arvind Narayanan Nov 21, 2022

The goal of decentralization shouldn't be a uniform distribution of instance sizes. That's unnecessary and unrealistic.

Decentralization prevents any one entity from exerting too much power over the whole ecosystem, allows cultural differences between communities, and enables semi-independent technical experimentation by instances so that successful innovations can percolate. These are the things that made the web successful. Mastodon has all of these, and isn't in danger of losing them.

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Arvind Narayanan Nov 22, 2022

One question is about how the current level of (de)centralization will change. I think two divergent paths are possible.

1. Instances continue to be volunteer run (and, in my ideal world, organizations like universities and media outlets will run instances for their members/employees). In this case, decentralization will continue and even increase.

2. There's an influx of commercially run instances. If this happens, there are inevitable centralizing trends — see how Gmail dominates email.

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Mithridates / Dave MacLeod

@randomwalker Agreed. There's even a certain 'verified' status to some servers that is probably prized. Like if you are on an official university's server, NASA, huge company etc. that only lets actual employees or members sign up then that's basically like having a blue check.