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.

@elliaivyworld I know! So how do we make this as easy and painless as possible?

Obviously, a choice must be made -- otherwise we run into the danger of re-centralization.