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

      • 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).