The same goes for other large servers.

Look at how many of the people you interact with are on the handful of the largest servers and imagine that just those handful of servers blocked your server.

Come, let‘s take this further…

Apparently Facebook/Meta is “joining” the fediverse. How nice of them. Now imagine that the largest instance is run by Zuckerberg. (Or <insert your favourite Silicon Valley billionaire here>.)

Imagine they become large enough to do the same thing to mastodon.social…

Dropping this 1M means that 90% of the Fediverse, according to fediverse.observer/stats, can still reach you. So, I call bullshit.

I hate Eugen's approach as much as you do, but please stop spreading FUD.

Organise the exodus of users from mastodon.social. Let us do a Reddit on this one instance.

Stop using Mastodon, the software, which is not very good and extremely resource-hungry, from what I understand.

Make the Fediverse truly decentralized again.

@Howard Let’s ask mastodon.social and just the ten most popular servers to block your instance and see :)

(They have the power to control whether or not you reach a huge percentage of the people on the fediverse. So they’re not just moderating their own servers, they’re moderating the fediverse. The larger they or others get, the more pronounced that effect will be. It’s about power differentials.)

Yes, very good, tens of thousands of people choose to have Eugen moderate for them, their choice, good for them.

I *just* need to be comfortable with my choice of moderators not everyone else's.

(my moderator is me, it's a privilege and I will figure out how to contribute to the community as a result)

Let's be frank here:

So.
Fucking.
What?

None of us is here chasing big follower numbers or any of the big social media games, we're here to communicate with people. We lose a bunch of followers and are unable to connect to that big instance, we just carry on, the Fediverse becomes temporarily smaller, then carries on and continues to grow organically again. Plus you underestimate how many of us will move out of the big instance if it becomes not to be trusted.

Yes and no.

While your assessment is spot on, you miss one point:
Even with mastodon.social being that big, it's not the only big instance (and will probably never be).
So, while Eugen could block you from >1 mio. users, he can only do that for those.

Additionally, the users are still in power and can move to any other instance when they want to.

Both are fundamental differences compared to Facebook and Twitter.

Is it ideal? Not at all!
Is it better? Hell, yes!

Not quite my experience. Less than 10 % of my follows are from #MastodonSocial (fools!). Being deferated from them would be annoying but hardly devastating.

Far worse for me would be to be defederated from the dear people of (in order of frequency):

fosstodon.org
chaos.social
eupolicy.social
social.coop
wikis.world

Sure, it's a normal process that's been going on forever - decentralization is confusing for people, people flock towards others, flocking generates power, power corrupts, and corruption causes protests and decentralization.

Still, I can't really complain about centralization if what I'm doing is exchanging messages between functional.cafe and thias.hellqui.st/ and mastodon.ar.al, which three instances have a total of 216 users and don't strictly need to care about the rest of the Fediverse.

If I can make a prediction about the future as well: we've survived centralized social media, we'll survive Eugen too. The tools are already here, we'll just need to wait for the Fediverse molochs to join the club of inevitably-crumbling-under-their-own-weight.

@aral

Functional Café

functional.cafe is an instance for people interested in functional programming and languages.

^{Mastodon hosted on functional.cafe}

I also run my own instance, that a dozen people use daily as their own… just wondering why you would imagine that mastodon.social or any other “big” instance would block yours…

I have been running and participating in online communities for 40 years (since fidonet / bbs days). I have never been blocked by anyone. Honestly, why would your experience be any different?

Also, I have no issues with big tech companies joining the fediverse… you can silence/block their instance if you wish (something I would not do myself, but hey, it’s up to you as an instance manager).

Although I dislike Facebook / meta with a passion, and do not use any of their sites, I do not have a problem with the people that make different choices. Glad to follow and be followed by some of them.

I really don’t get it. I follow you, love reading your posts, but do not share some of your views. I respect others, with different opinions and perspectives, live and let live.

While your point is completely right saying fedirverse is decentralized is wrong because the fediverse is federated. So the main risk is what you said you have to trust some admins. As someone else said before.

Is it the ideal? No
Is is better? Yes.

And if, while on "His" server, he decides you are still not worthy of his association, those millions of users will still block or mute you. He could make your life even worse by NOT throwing you off his server but keeping you their friendless and ignored.

At least with your own instance, you have choices, using someone else's server you need to abide by their rules and potentially warped views. 🤷‍♂️

Are you suggesting a particular direction to solve this problem?

Thinking about this, I think we need to think in terms of dynamic behaviors, not just instantaneous snapshots: if mastodon.social removes access to you for a lot of followers for whatever reason, at some point, the policies they set in place are going to upset their own users, so those will start to pressure the admins. Either the admins cave, or eventually they will lose users in a migration.