There's misinformation floating around about Mastodon. Clarifying things:

1. Mastodon doesn't rely on volunteers. It's a registered non-profit that employs people. Kind of like how Wikipedia and Mozilla are non-profits that employs people.
2. Many instances are run by volunteers but not all.
3. Mastodon is just one part of the Fediverse. Benefits of decentralization is that anyone can build on open protocols.
4. Mastodon is big, but Flickr and Tumbler are bigger -- they're joining the Fediverse

@atomicpoet tumblr is adding mastodon interoperability?

Holy shit, that might be a straight up turning point for this network

@revolcom Correction: Tumblr is adding support for ActivityPub, which presumably will interoperate with Mastodon.

Mastodon is one part of the Fediverse.

@atomicpoet well yeah, was simply using shorthands.

But would that make tumblr one giant "corporate" mastodon server? Because if mastodon wants to thrive it will need a big ass server that could handle all the normies

@revolcom Who knows! Automattic owns Tumblr, and they're well known for WordPress -- which is usually self-hosted.

So perhaps this means in the future: Tumblr will be federated with many self-hosted instances.

@atomicpoet damn i'm so out of the loop, didn't know the WordPress guys had bought tumblr. But considering automatic themselves host WordPress blogs as well i'm guessing they'll probably host tumblr as well which could bring a large enough instance that could host millions, and make it user friendly enough to make mastodon competitive with Twitter
@revolcom I'll let you in on something. When it comes to persistence and longevity, Mastodon already outcompetes Twitter.
@atomicpoet yeah but hosting capacity and user friendliness? You're gonna need a server that can host at least 300 million users
@revolcom Oh, so you're a recentralist. Do you realize that just recreates tech monopolies?
@atomicpoet i just think its inevitable tbh. For us techies and weirdos this kind of decentralization is fun and good. But for most normies they just want a quick and easy gmail account
@revolcom Then why are you literally here?

@atomicpoet because i am a weirdo, lol

And also elon just banned me because i said someone aught to slap kanye, lol

@revolcom Then you probably understand the problems with centralization. Ergo, we need to do the opposite and decentralize.

Some things shouldn't be quick and easy.

@atomicpoet i completely understand it, which is why i support mastodon.
But i just think that in the end there will come some sort of major mastodon instance, commercially owned, used for hosting the majority of not tech savy users. For the normies.

We'll still have our own independent instances though, obviously

@revolcom @atomicpoet Well i don't see a major problem either way, wether tumblr will become a giant instance or not... Like, gmail is probably the largest email provider but i still have the choice to use a different service or run my own server.

Regarding Automattic and whatever model tumblr will run on in the future: Possibly both as an ad-supported or freemium service and as a self-hosted solution, although i don't really see much of a point in the latter option as there's already plenty of choice out there.

They've done both things already with wordpress though. There's both the Wordpress CMS for folks who like to self-host and the freemium wordpress[dot]com service for those who prefer not to. These things can coexist perfectly fine.
@groschi @atomicpoet exactly i don't fear that this service will become "recentralized", but i do think one commercial instance will become the largest