How much decentralisation is too much?
fediverse mastodon ReDeCentralize · 22 comments · 1,000 words · Viewed ~4,074 times.
Twitter's over, my dudes! And now everyone is on Mastodon! But Mastodon isn't a site, it is a federated network running an interoperable protocol! Yay for ActivityPub0!
Anyway, that means there isn't one Mastodon website. There are many. There is only one Twitter. There is only one Facebook. There is only one Instagram. If you want to interact with Twitter/FB/Insta then you have to do it on those websites, or via the official apps.
Mastodon is decentralised. I am on Mastodon.Social, and you are on Mastodon.me.uk. Those are different servers. But we can still see each others' messages.
All of those different servers have multiple users. Some of the big servers have hundreds of thousands of accounts, some of the smaller ones only a few dozen. We're all apart, even when we're together. This is the joy - and the sorrow - of decentralisation.
What's the optimal size of a server? Bigger ones might be slower, or they may benefit from efficiencies of scale. Smaller ones might be more nimble, but may not have the resources to keep the server going.
Let's take a look at PixelFed - a federated version of Flickr / Instagram. There are about 280 different PixelFed instances you could join. Here's a graph showing the number of users on the top 25 instances:
Pretty classic "long-tail" there. A dominant main server. A credible second place. A distant third. And then all the rest quickly descend under 100 users.
I want to be very clear - I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It is entirely possible to have a sustainable server which only has one user.
For example, the Raspberry Pi foundation has an instance at aspberrypi.social. It only has a single account you can follow - @Raspberry_Pi@raspberrypi.social.
Is that the future?
What happens if everyone has their own instance? Would managing spam and blocklists on the Fediverse be as difficult as managing them for email?
Inside of you there are two extremes
Consider email. Almost everyone is on GMail, O365, or one of a limited number of big email providers. Even if you're a digital extremist and have your own domain name, you almost certainly don't run your own email server. It's just too complicated and no one wants a full-time unpaid job keeping up with the admin of configuring, patching, and defending their mail.
Similarly, I doubt anyone wants to spend much more than a couple of hours per year setting up and maintaining their federated social network app.
Those of us vain / paranoid enough to want to be @MyName@my-domain.xyz will almost certainly just rent computing power and space from one of the big Mastodon providers.
What about big businesses?
I love that idea. But businesses don't run servers any more. If you're a small business, you just outsource everything to Google or Microsoft. If you're a big business... the same!
It's easier and cheaper to pay dedicated professionals to run specialist appliances than it is to bring them in-house.
Predictions
Making predictions is a fool's game. So here are my predictions for the future of Federated Services:
- Die-hard geeks like me will still run our family's Fediverse apps from a Raspberry Pi tucked in a cupboard.
- Small sellers will offer Fediverse packages just the same way as they do one-click WordPress installs. But they'll mostly all be running on AWS anyway.
- Twitter - or someone like them - will start offering "Fediverse-as-a-Service". You can be
@Bob@Mastodon.Your_Domain.com- but it'll be Twitter under the hood. Just like GMail for domains. - People will have multiple instances they need to be on. Work and personal, for example. Just as some of us have a family email which is different from the friends one. But they'll all come through to a single app.
- Facebook - or someone like them - will gradually add "enhancements" to their service which will cause it not to work other Federated systems. The first time this happens it will be excused as a mistake. But, just like how Google killed off XMPP, it will eventually become a silo. Not many people will notice, because the majority of their friends are all on the same instance.
- Someone will invent a server which runs on your Android phone. It would revolutionise decentralisation and federation. But it chews up battery and Apple bans the iOS version for no good reason. So it never takes off except with a few people prepared to root their devices and carry an extra battery.
- A nation-state will insist that every citizen and resident must have an account on the national Mastodon. Perhaps in order to listen to the thoughts of Dear Leader™. Perhaps for some sinister monitoring purpose. If you want to talk to your buddies in that region, your server may have to Federate with something running old, outdated, or hostile software.
- Geeks like me will rage that this all could been avoided if everyone bought their own Raspberry Pi and learned half-a-dozen simple Linux commands.
Perhaps that's pessimistic of me? I think the pendulum will swing a few more times at least.
There might be a dozen different phone networks in your country. Yes, they Federate with each other, but they all happen to be running close-to-identical networking gear made by Nokia or Huawei. Yes, you can put your SIM in any device, but chances are it is either Android or iOS.
We'll be stuck with the illusion of Federation.
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I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mastodon, is in fact, ActivityPub/Mastodon, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, ActivityPub plus Mastodon. Mastodon is not an service unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Fediverse made useful by the W3C core protocols and other vital components etc. etc. ↩︎
@erik@infrageeks.social says:
Nick says:
Internet Person says:
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