Also, we have to set out the metric for success.

Is our goal to have 100 million accounts on mastodon.social while every other server only has one account?

If that happened, I believe Mastodon would be a failure as a decentralized project.

Mastodon’s success isn’t that 11 million people use it. It’s that it’s part of a network of 24,569 nodes.

The problem is—and I can’t stress this enough—that certain people just want a Twitter replacement.

They’re not looking long term. They’re not considering future implications on network infrastructure. They’re not foreseeing that a temporary solution could potentially become permanent.

The goal here isn’t just to get everyone off Twitter, it’s to destroy Big Social.

And how to do that? Decentralize!

But if you re-centralize on one server, the Fediverse is as good as dead.

If your intent is to push people off Twitter towards mastodon.social, then Twitter has won.

Elon musk has a net worth of $174B.

And mastodon.social has a tiny sliver of $300,000 a year.

If Mastodon is re-centralized, it is in a fight that it cannot win. It just takes Elon Musk to buy it outright for the game to be over.

But if Mastodon does what it does best—decentralization—then it will win because Mastodon *cannot* be bought!

Some people might believe that decentralization is mere idealism, but in fact it's practical.

Yes, centralization is "easy" in more ways than one.

It is easy for onboarding -- but also easy for Big Social to acquire.

Decentralization is hard for onboarding. It is also hard for Big Social to acquire.

I've alluded to this earlier today.

https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/110255664058403160

I think there's a happy medium between "join the default" and "choose one of 10,000 servers".

Maybe that medium is a wizard that helps people find their *best* Mastodon server.

@atomicpoet I would agree with this! But I think right now, moving to a default in one app on one platform is a good step towards getting there! I don’t think randomizing servers based on some list is a better solution. A wizard or a collection organized easily by interest areas seems like a good idea! But the thing is, you’ll always have to make choices and leave options off a list. And that’s not a failure!

And frankly, if data portability mattered, a lot of this would be moot.

@film_girl So I want to be clear. I really do want more people to use the Fediverse.

I also want decentralization to exist because it's important for the Fediverse to belong to all of us instead of one guy who owns the largest server.

So how do we accomplish both goals?

@atomicpoet I mean, I think we first have to acknowledge that the guy who owns the largest server is also the defacto BDFL of the project. And if you can’t reconcile that (which is fair!), then it might need to be forked like Pleroma or Soapbox. So Mastodon != Fediverse and Mastodon != ActivityPub is number one.

I agree that decentralization is good but we need to all acknowledge there is a central group making the technical decisions and that that group also owns the largest server. 1/X