Post APqFnqEnh8oqa8yQ64 by randomwalker@mastodon.social
 (DIR) More posts by randomwalker@mastodon.social
 (DIR) Post #APqFnqEnh8oqa8yQ64 by randomwalker@mastodon.social
       2022-11-21T19:48:40Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       There's a claim going around that Mastodon is "centralizing around a few instances" because 1% of instances account for 84% of users. https://mathstodon.xyz/@manlius/109383027753990134That's misleading. 1% of instances is ~360. That's a lot more than I expected! Impressively decentralized.Measuring centralization as a % doesn't make sense. Hypothetically, if 100K new people each started their own instance, centralization as measured by this stat would greatly *increase*, even though that's not what actually happened.
       
 (DIR) Post #APqFnvt2gwyo6Oq812 by randomwalker@mastodon.social
       2022-11-21T19:57:51Z
       
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       The goal of decentralization shouldn't be a uniform distribution of instance sizes. That's unnecessary and unrealistic.Decentralization prevents any one entity from exerting too much power over the whole ecosystem, allows cultural differences between communities, and enables semi-independent technical experimentation by instances so that successful innovations can percolate. These are the things that made the web successful. Mastodon has all of these, and isn't in danger of losing them.
       
 (DIR) Post #APqG3w8bWgrBVvkYzo by cy@mstdn.io
       2022-11-21T22:10:08Z
       
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       @randomwalker Generally centralization happens as a result of stress to the network. People have to shelter under the dubious rule of warlords and all. Like with email, Google put their significant network infrastructure to sending massive amounts of spam emails to everyone, not to sell stuff, but to stress the network so they can monopolize it bit by bit.