this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Your thoughts on the concentration of users around big and flagship instances ? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by anticurrent@sh.itjust.works to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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

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[–] quixotic120@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Very much this. They way it was explained to me was akin to what you are saying, single login, jump servers whenever. In practice it is not that

I’m a shitty developer by all measures but I assume such a feature would be tremendously difficult to implement especially this late in the game. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think so. Like would my username have to be reserved across all instances? Would a new instance have to get some kind of list of known usernames? Where would that even come from? Who knows, not me, that’s for sure

However if it could be done I think that would be a huge selling point. “Imagine if your server started being a shitty place like facebook and you could just move to another without having to nuke your account” is a pretty big deal

[–] fushuan@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago

Even if the username changed, having some feature where you can transfer your account and follows, history and notify all to your followers of the new name so their follow list gets updated could be coded, and it would make instance hopping relatively easy.

I'm against reserving your name in all instances but having a feature to change the handle and that all your followers don't suddenly know who you are is important. Something akin to creating the new one, notifying of the change and leaving the old one directing to the new one for some time.

Or just not letting you swap to an instance if the handle exists. Idk. But this would make me actually start using mastodon if it were a feature. I might even start a fork and work on it.