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I think the centralization on mastodon.social is a bit over estimated. According to fedidb.com there are over 1.1M active users in the fediverse. Of these mastodon.social has about 273k. That means mastodon.social has about 1/4 of the active users. The rest are scattered over nearly 43k servers. So I'd say the fediverse is pretty decentralized. That would make it pretty resilient.

by snailmailman22 hours ago|

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This is the real strength of ActivityPub compared to ATProto. I follow a lot of accounts on mastodon, and only a handful of them are on mastodon.social. Globally though looks like 1/4 of the accounts are there.

If the instance goes down, the network stays up and continues to work, minus only the accounts on mastodon.social. This is not the case on bluesky afaik. They got DDosed a few months ago and the whole network was down because of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802330

In ATProto there aren't 'instances', and its technically 'decentralized' but theres really only bluesky.

by dokyun1 days ago|

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On fedi there are several distinct pockets apart from the mastodon crowd which although don't dominate in raw headcount have their own flavour and unique view of the network (in 2nd place is "dark fedi", which has more shitposters, hackers and free speech adjacents; there's also a contingent of Japanese users mostly on Misskey instances). What I get out of AT is that this wouldn't really happen, since the content distribution would dominate your view with Bluesky posts regardless of your relationship with the rest of the network.

by tao_oat1 days ago|

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In AT you also get communities, in the same way that twitter had weird twitter, black twitter, and so on. But because you, by design, don't really see what PDS people use, it's more fluid.

I personally think that this actually leads to healthier communities but that may be a matter of taste!

by dokyun1 days ago|

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Yeah, I mean a big reason why Fedi is segmented the way it is, is because the Mastodon crowd has a lot of merited and unmerited prejudices against the other parts of the network, and put a lot of effort into splitting it with centralized blocklists. The W3C working group that works with the AP spec (which refuses to cooperate with credible people representative of projects like Pleroma) is now looking to adopt a centralized moderation model similar to Bluesky's. It's one of the issues with the instance model, even though users have the tools to shape their own view of the network, to not have to see things they don't like, instance admins still get to dictate who they're allowed to talk to and what they see. I don't think that's right, even if the reasons are justifiable.

The guy who runs FSE (one of dark fedi's more notable instances) has written a lot of good blog posts on his side of the technical and social details, his one about running FediList is a good picture of the type of one-sided politics involved (and, if you're into the technical stuff, is rich with that too): https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/about-fedilist.htm...