Mastodon has seen a renewed interest these last few days, but when you look at the statistics mastodon.social siphons the biggest part of the pie, it sees a few thousands new sign-ups a day, while medium sized instance and smaller ones only get a few, sometimes just single digits increase.

This has been exacerbated since mastodon changed its UI both on web and mobile apps, to make the flagship instance the default one for sign-up in an effort to lower the entry barrier, which on the same time is leading to unhealthy concentration, on a platform that advocates for decentralization through federation.

Do you think this is the way forward on the fediverse ?

#mastodon #pixelfed #lemmy #fediverse

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    203·
    2 days ago

    I really dislike it, the better way would have been randomly choosing one of the mid sized ones.

        • Die4Ever@programming.dev
          2·
          1 day ago

          any idea how much disk space it costs to join this? like if you have an empty instance, does it add more than 1GB per month?

          • isoA
            2·
            22 hours ago

            I created this tool and have been using it in my instance since the very beginning. My instance is almost 2 years old and it’s total database size is 60.2GB.

            What people don’t understand about this tool is:

            • If a community is generating enough activity, it’s likely that someone from your instance is already following that community.
            • If a community isn’t generating enough activity, it won’t create much of a network/storage burden anyway.

            Sure, it will make a small difference, but it’s nothing compared to the benefits it provides.

      • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
        1·
        2 days ago

        this is the way.

        small instances that can have niche content, owned and operated by those users (think beehaw) but with the ability to consume/interact with content from the rest of the fediverse (onramping).