Today in Email Hegemony.
Here are the 2025 top ten domains from orders placed on the @dnalounge store. Remember this the next time someone uses email as an example of a federation success story.
73.0% gmail.com
8.5% yahoo.com
7.1% icloud.com
2.6% hotmail.com
0.7% outlook.com
0.6% aol.com
0.5% comcast.net
0.5% me.com
0.4% sbcglobal.net
0.3% live.com
5.8% everything else
Likely ~26%
https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
(I'm assuming the largest instance is mastodon.social)
@shadowdancer @alienghic @jwz I was analyzing instances of my followers and it is like:
mastodon.social 416
mastodonczech.cz 315
witter.cz 105
f.cz 84
mastodon.arch-linux.cz 84
cztwitter.cz 75
bsky.brid.gy 42
mas.to 42
mstdn.social 37
mastodon.online 34
mastodon.world 31
infosec.exchange 22
mastodon.pirati.cz 21
mamutovo.cz 20
vivaldi.net 18
mastodon.scot 14
c.im 14
chaos.social 13
pixelfed.social 12
kolektiva.social 11
fosstodon.org 11
aus.social 10
beige.party 10
mathstodon.xyz 9
masto.ai 8
mastodon.uno 7
libera.site 7
hachyderm.io 7
universeodon.com 7
mastodon.green 7
troet.cafe 6
pixelfed.cz 6
mastodon.art 6
...
Of course, my case is language-specific (.cz). Still, around 20% of followers come from mastodon.social.
In terms of MAU (monthly active users), mastodon.social is currently around 39% of total Mastodon users -- up from 17.5% in May 2023.
Better federation of replies is certainly a big plus and makes things much better on smaller instances! But the increased centralization on mastodon.social is more because that's the default signup in the app (and joinmastodon.social site) -- and migration is enough of a pain (including losing your posting history) that most people either stay there or leave fedi instead of trying to find another alternative.
@jdp23 yes, I recently tried to introduce one local journalist to koncept of replacing the less and less reliable corporate social media by Mastodon and the first think he did was... registering an account on Mastodon.social, of course.
Something should be done about this, because lot of confused users end on mastodon.social. But the next logical step, after federation of replies, is a way to allowing publicly followable lists, which can be shared in timeline. The Mastodon landscape would change overnight.
@xChaos that would be useful! hopefully the work Mastodon is doing on Packs is a step in this direction.
The good news is that people are generally aware of the need to do something about the centralizing trend -- including Mastodon's new CEO and community lead. So hopefully things will improve over time!
jwz
panu
Diane
Chao-c'
Jon