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
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
Jon
Chao-c'