@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.