I highly recommend the excellent book "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu.

It details the initial decentralization, followed by centralization and monopoly, of various media from telegrams to film, radio, tv, telephones, cable TV, and the Internet.

It's a fascinating read, and well worth your time.

One of the big mistakes people make, over and over again, is relying on technological determinism.

That is, thinking the architecture of the technology will preserve the topology of the network.

Mastodon is Open Source. It's built with open standards.

This is necessary but not sufficient to keep the network decentralized.

We're going to need social and legal structures, plus cultural norms, that counterbalance Metcalfe's law, which pushes the network towards centralization.

@evan @markallerton @ks

I do agree that centralization is coming to the fediverse, but not for any of the reasons that most people on here think. That centralization is coming for the exact same reasons that centralization came to email, and it's a reason that many folks that would like things to stay decentralised keep ignoring.

And that is user safety.

A lot of Mastodon fans keep pretending that Mastodon is inclusive. It's not. But it could be.

@evan @markallerton @ks

As a Black person, simply signing up for a Mastodon account can expose you to vile racist slurs and threats of violence. Most Mastodon users are one popular toot away from discovering that their instance mods are either unwilling or completely unprepared to deal with this.

Because a centralized whitelist was abused in a cynical attack years ago, the fediverse kinda gave up on that idea, and has been very resistant to it ever since.

@evan @markallerton @ks

It's entirely possible for decentralized instances to provide safety, but most don't/won't. I'm super happy with hachyderm.io for example. ♥️👍🏿

But a larger company is going to integrate with the fediverse, and fulfill the most basic user feature request: "As a user of your product, I would like to know that signing up will not expose me to death threats from nazis" 🤷🏿‍♂️

Then more new users are going to flow there.

@evan @markallerton @ks

The best thing to do to "counter" this coming centralization is super easy to do, but from my short time observing here, it won't happen:

1. There should be stricter criteria for an instance being listed on "join Mastodon." Insufficient moderation gets you de-listed. Handle cynical false reports.

2. It should be easier for a new admin to just check a box and opt-in to a whitelisted federation that excludes the worst instances.

@mekkaokereke I agree. I think JM is a great structure for making default policy for the network. Requiring active moderation and use of shared allow/deny lists is a great criterion for entry.

I also dislike a shared allowlist. It shuts down growth at a time when we need to be reaching more people than ever.

There are 12000 Mastodon sites up, according to some estimates. There are 150 sites on the Rapidblock list. I think a blocklist makes more sense here.

@evan @mekkaokereke instances.social is implicitly an allowlist, and 💯 agreed with Mekka that the group running that needs to do a better job at ensuring a minimum set of criteria.

(But also agree that a universal allowlist would be complicated, but maybe worthwhile? Long term, allowing small instances, like "we've seen exactly one user here? Fine." but having alerting for new instances with large numbers of users seems an important shared infrastructure.)

@evan @mekkaokereke one possibly relevant thought here: while requiring government ID for individual users or domain names seems fraught, having some kind of identification and verification requirement for instance administrators to get their instance on a public allowlist seems *totally reasonable* to me.

Speaking for myself, I would happily do this for any personal, business, or community instances that I might ever run.

@andrea @evan @mekkaokereke I definitely didn't and wouldn't suggest applying this to personal identity. That would, as you say, be a terrible idea.

The flipside is that I have a lot of empathy for people who face real threats of violence in unmoderated spaces. I refuse to keep viable options categorically off the table in order to protect e.g. white hacker dudes' ability to be "free."