@Mrfunkedude @FediTips

I do actually discuss this in the article?

Mastodon.social is by far the largest instance and growing, and it is the only instance being promoted as a default on the official apps and official website.

It makes sense to suggest a single instance to non-techy people who can't make up their mind, but it doesn't make sense to suggest the largest instance to them.

There are plenty of other reliable instances with good track records going back years, which I link to in the article. They could suggest from a rotating pool of those.

@Mrfunkedude @FediTips

It is a poor experience right now for lots of reasons, not just this hypothetical (although there is no shortage of corporations betraying trust, so not necessarily *that* hypothetical.)

It is hard to get to know your neighbours on a large instance. SOOO many messages. MUCH harder to moderate, which means abusers slip through. Costs more money to run. Waters down core theme (retro, music, academia, etc.) if applicable. Why voluntarily submit to a poorer experience?

@Mrfunkedude

"With all due respect..."

He says, from Mastodon dot Social

Ah, the irony, the irony

cc @FediTips

@Mrfunkedude

My "main fear" -- as you put it -- is that a mega-instance is poorly moderated (if it's moderated at all) such that my public/remote and public feeds are filled with extremely explicit, full-contact, full penetration homosexual pornography, all emanating from Mastodon dot Social exclusively

Which may not trouble you, but de gustibus non est disputandum, right?

cc @FediTips

@sibrosan @FediTips To begin with there's no account portability. In other words, all the account switching is done server-side.

This means it's rather mundane to literally just completely prevent users from leaving the platform. Personally, I consider this to be a intrinsic vulnerability that needs to be addressed ASAP. Even Bluesky has account portability.

The largest issue beyond that is that large instances can restrict in and outwards flow of lots and lots of people. The same way twitter continues to drag people back because there's some people you can only follow there, a large mastodon instance can hold people, their followers, and who they follow, completely hostage.

**TL;DR:** Network effects cause the issue described. Lack of account portability is the largest issue.

@sibrosan

It would be able to simply defederate from the smaller instances, and, say, decide to federate with Gab or other such trash heaps.

And by your knee-jerk against the notion of spreading out, you are underscoring the problem: m.s. is incorrectly seen as the default, if it becomes infected, many users will not actually know they can switch instances.

They might know it on some remote intellectual level, but they will not know it as an actual practical option.

Because ms is shown as the default.

Remember when MS got in trouble for promoting their browser as the default?

Same thing.

Although ms is more at risk from being usurped by Meta, atm.

@FediTips

@sibrosan

Mastodon.social is already such a large percentage of the network, that many instances feel unable to block it, even if they want to.

The more of the network is on mastodon.social, the worse this situation becomes, and the more power they have over the rest of the network.

"would it become any more difficult to switch to another instance"

They could switch it off, or they could degrade it in some way. Anything is possible once you have the network effect on your side.

@transponderings @FediTips

Rather than "safety in numbers", one of the largest reasons there are so few mail providers is in actuality spam and abuse. And also ease of use of services like Gmail & Outlook's free nature, of course.

This isn't something that the Fediverse is immune to either, so it's something I worry about constantly.

We need moderation solutions that scale (perhaps mutualistic blocking, of some form?), otherwise we're going to get screwed over.

@transponderings

The whole point of federation is that no particular instance is central.

That point becomes lost if any particular instance becomes central by default.

Like, look at Twitter. There are still people on there because all the people they know are on there.

Same with Facebook.

A default instance is anathema to federation.

@FediTips

@transponderings

I don't think it's as inevitable as it seems.

The fact that the Fediverse exists despite the network effect of Twitter etc shows that there's always hope for alternatives to be created.

It would be especially helpful if there were some good stable alternatives to Mastodon's software, either a hard fork or something totally different. (GoToSocial looks particularly nice but it's still in alpha testing and the devs aren't advising its use yet.)

@shellsharks @FediTips the technical knowledge (you may not think so but it is) needed is way too much for any regular person to want to try. They want to focus on other things in their lives and don't want to take a techy side quest.

It's an important alternative, but until it gets easier [one click brainlessly easier] it's not going to happen for the majority of people.

@emovulcan

There are ready-made blocklists you can put on your instance, more about them here:

https://fedi.tips/importing-ready-made-server-blocklists-on-mastodon/

You can regularly upload the latest blocklist manually, and I think there's a feature on the way that would let you automate this process.

@astrojuanlu

As long as you don't delete the old account, your old posts will redirect people to your new account.

(And it isn't even at the end of the article! 🙂 )

@dan

"On the flip side I have seen cases where people have advised others against spinning up their own self-hosted single-user instances, making statements such as "that's not what the fediverse is about" or "that doesn't help the fediverse grow"."

...that's um... sort of weird?

I can understand not doing your own server because of cost or time, and a single user server is more work to get it to notice the rest of the Fedi, but having lots of servers is exactly what the Fedi is about!