Big surprise for me was how much mastodon.social is growing (especially given the tension about its dominance).
It's current trend is to grow by the equivalent of the 23rd largest instance per month while most (ie largest) instances are growing by 2% per month (ie a few thousand, which, guessing, would be something like the 300th largest instance or so ... ie small).
Also, depending on what counts as "large" (>10k users?), 70-80% of fediverse is probably on large instances, which must have implications for federating/moderating with safety in mind.
If you were admining an instance that cares about safety, when do you start with the "federate" list rather than "defederate" list and ignore all the big ones (>20k?)
Anyone doing this sort of analysis properly? Could #fedidb include such?
Of 150 largest instances (min 8k users, extent of my "analysis"), the MAU/Total User ratio had no relationship with the total user count. Said ratio varies from 0-40% with outliers 48, 53, 75%.
Though, all high MAU ratio instances are small.
That is: all >30% MAU ratio instances have ~30k or fewer users. So small instance community is probably working well, but not reliably so?
we need more smaller instances, and simple ways for users to create their own.
and i'm not speaking about centralized providers, rather simple ways to install everything. preferably via gui for your average user. a wizard that takes you from registering a domain, over setting up a backend/frontend to logging in the first time.
Always is! Sorry, I meant, it should not be more difficult than installing an app. But then again, it’s interesting to watch how many people struggle to install apps.
@arinbasu1@Tony@Bloomfer@maegul I run a small instance as @admin. Running your own independent server or vps does require basic SysAdmin skills (and mindset). People who do will almost certainly have a domain or three so adding on a 'social' subdomain and point it at the server is trivial and free.
Reducing that to an app is imho a pipedream. More promising is a hoster offering a managed vps with Mastodon or whatever as a service. Taking responsibility for backups and managing data storage.
@arinbasu1@Tony@Bloomfer@maegul@admin Adding to this even experienced SysAdmins who celebrated getting their Mastodon instance running (not without incident) suddenly hit the harder problem of getting it to federate successfully. Six months on I'm only just succeeding - yesterday we only hit 50% of known instances. This required extra software.
Running your own instance is great and rewarding. But be careful of building unrealistic expectations, fragile servers and disappointing results.
You are advocating for centralization in the end with a service provider for fediverse instances. And not everyone has a domain or knows how to get one.
I'm fine with pleroma and it's ability to federate. I made some changes to soapbox, since it was the cleanest interface but lacking in some departments.
The app was used to say how simple the process would have to be for the masses to adopt it. We can not expect everyone to know how to setup a server/maintain it.
@Bloomfer@Tony@maegul@arinbasu1 Certainly not. I'm advocating against monolithic instances. I'm thinking along the choices non-IT people have with, say, WordPress. A multiplicity of hosters offering managed solutions including a domain or sub-domain.
People who have a #RaspberryPi and a decent broadband connection, on the other hand, also have scripts and videos to get them going. Great for a personal instance. Most will have the required skills (or the #RPi will still be in the drawer ;-)
@Bloomfer@Tony@maegul@arinbasu1 A major issue for non-IT people is managing data storage - which is probably their biggest issue as it grows uncontrollably beyond the 40/80GB they may have with a budget vps.. Will they find and change the default cache rentention from unlimited to, say, a more realisti 7-30 days?
Or do you expect find, configure S3 or equivalent off-site storage?
Homebrew is easier 'cos you can just upgrade with an ever cheaper SSD.
> Certainly not. I'm advocating against monolithic instances. I'm thinking along the choices non-IT people have with, say, WordPress. A multiplicity of hosters offering managed solutions including a domain or sub-domain.
such providers are a weak point and allow for censorship.
> People who have a #RaspberryPi and a decent broadband connection, on the other hand, also have scripts and videos to get them going. Great for a personal instance. Most will have the required skills (or the #RPi will still be in the drawer ;-)
good luck getting a static ip, and not some nat mess. sadly for european isps ipv6 is an impossible upgrade
@Bloomfer@Tony@maegul@arinbasu1 That's a reducing issue these days as IPv6 becomes more prevalent as it is (with the UK providers I've worked with) effectively gives a fixed large range. You need to use Cloudflare or other CDM to proxy it for IPv4 users but that's free for small instances.
More to the point Mastodon is reportably difficult to install without a IPv4 connection. But that should be fixable by the developers. Hopefully soon.
> hat's a reducing issue these days as IPv6 becomes more prevalent as it is (with the UK providers I've worked with) effectively gives a fixed large range.
my isp can't even setup a nat, i'm having access to half the villages lans...
> You need to use Cloudflare or other CDM to proxy it for IPv4 users but that's free for small instances.
and we are again at a single point of centralization. in the end i think we are again at the nostr approach. where you take your account with you.
@Bloomfer@Tony@maegul@arinbasu1 Anybody who can spin up an Apache/Nginx instance can proxy it for you. Opposite of centralisation which is the whole point of being here.
'Free' tiers of commercial providers tend to go non-free over time. Hence use 'em when free but build an independent alternative. for later
Do we need for some sort of Trade Union for us little instances - to challenge any decisions the majors might make that effectively isolates or makes second class netcitizens of us?
> Do we need for some sort of Trade Union for us little instances - to challenge any decisions the majors might make that effectively isolates or makes second class netcitizens of us?
No no no, i do not want others to talk for me and how i run my instance. We are who we make ourselves. Fediverse software is mostly open sauce. Go and change what you dislike but do not strive for a committee to speak for you. This will end in infighting and censorship within the group
We hopefully, will never get into the same position with Mastodon/ActivityPub but always be prepared. I need smarter guys than me to be watching, advising and, if necessary, warning.
we are not winning anything. the internet is less decentralized than ever before. people are spread over less and less sites. large corporation control our speech. the gdpr is a joke and made browsing the internet just worse.
no you don't need others to think for you, do it yourself. think about what you want, what you will leave behind and act accordingly
@Bloomfer@Tony@maegul@arinbasu1 The Nominet membership would differ. A vital part of the UK internet infrastructure is now working for the Public Benefit again - not the megacorps and greedy incompetent directors.
Cheer up. We had a great public orientated social media - Usenet & later independent forums. They were killed by the Twitter/Faceebook/TikTok brigade and folks like me just gave up.
Mastodon/ActivityPub has brought back that public benefit ethos that was all but dead a year ago.
we are not getting back to those times. they are gone and nothing will bring them back. There is now too much money to be made from your attention. Having your brain turned into mush from 30sec blinking lights is what keeps the money flowing.
> folks like me just gave up.
“There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites—conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it’s all the same.”
why are you only talking about mastodon and ignoring the existence of pleroma etc?
I think I have always referred to Mastodon/Activity Pub jointly implying Mastodon & Mastodon.social are, like it or not, the dominant players in a larger market which includes alternate servers and smaller players.
This thread emerged on a discussion on small Mastodon instances.
I've argued against Mastodon.social becoming more dominant for it's own good. We should be on the same side if not exactly in the same place.
@maegul What would be nice I think is if there were a way to have each user as their own instance. As in, an install of a very basic AP capable server on mobile or computer which is used for each user to communicate. Prolly not possible using what's currently available, just something that's been rattlin round in my head fer a while.
I'd only add that then having platforms for congregation into various communities with moderation etc really gets you into flexible and diverse social media territory.
My little lens on it is that it decouples hosting and community management and allows us users to not be bound to the identity/culture of an instance while still being members of large/vibrant/thriving communities.
@maegul I think the moderated communities might already be doable. We have a system for forums/groups which could (does?) have a roles system attached to it for moderation. If each AP instance regardless of flavor, were able to both create and search for and list each of these into a sortable and filterable list, that could solve the communities vs instances issues.
As it stands, most people believe they they are limited to the community and focus of the instance they join.
@eshep@fediversenews@maegul What if there was an instance of/for admins and moderators, from everywhere, to talk about issues and solve problems together?
I mean, just generally, that seems like one honking good idea.
Might also help with the constant "hashtag fediblock" problem of people constantly policing/arguing what it's/not for.
Also, should any instance run into trouble, having another users can look to for any information from their admin on what's going on would also be useful.
@maegul@jcastroarnaud@eshep@fediversenews LOL. It sounds like a hilariously bad idea. Look at the nature of all the communities in the Fediverse (all of them). Imagine putting all those admins in a sack together and tying it up. Fediblock is bad enough.
However, I do think there should be an in-universe, out of band mechanism for admins to communicate. To notify about issues, pass along hints for blocking, share knowledge.
I've been looking this stuff up too. On the Pleroma side, it's not even top 20 - it's like the top 5 instances are like 70% of the market (not accurate number, am just rattling off percentages off the top of my head, but it is a large number of users).
I also wonder how many "alt" accounts there are. When you look up the monthly active user numbers, the number of active users drops dramatically. VERY dramatically.
I think it's interesting that so many mastodon instances block the biggest ones on the fediverse. Like from a pure reach standpoint, you'd think more people seeing your stuff is better?
I self host and the benefit for me, is being immune to instance - instance drama. If one instance blocks another, it doesn't affect who I can talk with.
Idk, I follow this stuff because I'm curious if this is ever going to hit a growth stage and really grow. I think if there is going to be a large influx of users, it'll probably happen in the next year (during election cycle in the US)
@Tony I’m actually clueless about what instances are blocked and by which.
I didn’t know it was common for many instances to block the big ones. Seems consistent with what I figured the direction of the fediverse is. How do you know this?
instances.social sees about 17k instances. These account for ~25 million statuses/month - far short of the billion @Gagron and others have posted. With ~1.6 million AU (av 660/month each) this is implausible.
Maybe the ~4k extra instances you see may comprise the largely de-federated including prolific spambots pumping out nearly a billion which go nowhere near any instance with a decent blocklist.
If you're categorizing these as small instances based on their MAUs (instead of overall users), then by my count there are only 6 such "non-small" instances.
@pevohr@fediversenews Fair. I was trying to give an impression of the shape of the data. From memory, these are the outliers in terms of size. Generally, there’s a clear pattern that higher MAU ratio instances are on the smaller end.
I don’t follow what you mean by 6 non-small instances?
@maegul@fediversenews Just that fedidb only lists 6 instances with >30K MAU, as opposed to 39 with >30k total users.
I only skimmed down to the >20k cutoff, but agree that many of the older/larger instances tended to have lower MAUs. Those three outliers definitely outshine their similarly-sized peers. (Unclear why they're doing a better job at staving off churn.)
@pevohr@fediversenews well two of them are tech focused so I figure that has something to do with it as this place seems to attract and work for tech people.
It's also possible that so far the current approach to moderation on those instances has been a good match (scale-wise) to the homogeneity of their respective communities.
@maegul@fediversenews I don't have the required expertise in statistics, but I think that large instances are smaller than you think, maybe > 3K users. Tiny ones are < 10-15 users.
From instances.social, today: range of # of users, versus # of instances. For example, 234 instances have 400 to 1000 users. No MAU stats, sorry.
@jcastroarnaud@fediversenews
Awesome! I was hoping someone would have these numbers. So about half of instances are single user?
Actually, I think what counts as large isn’t merely statistical, but functional. Once an instance has too many people it can be harder to moderate and more suspicious when it comes to federation, because even 0.1% of users can be dodgy and ruin it. I allude to this in my comment about safety. What’s “too many”? I guessed 10,000. But it’s complex obviously.
@maegul@fediversenews More like a third of the instances, instead of half: 5069 of 16424 instances have 1 user, 2812 have 2, 1566 have 3, 991 have 4, 12490 have less than 10.
And I agree: things are more complicated than just number of users. My guess is that the moderators' work is proportional, not only to the # of users of the instance, but also to the # of users, of other instances, visible from the instance.
I would guess that instances 2 or 3 users could very well be single-user instances with a couple of accounts for various purposes, but point taken.
There's probably an interesting issue around how the number of moderators scale with the size of an instance and how it needs to scale for effective moderation. Moreover, this scaling may very well change as the fediverse grows and more mainstream users come over.
@jcastroarnaud@maegul@fediversenews
It's fine, nearly all services seem to make the error that people may have multiple accounts, probably because you can't programmatically know the actual number.
Small instances are more likely to be personal so more used or not used at all, I agree .
@jcastroarnaud@AlisonW@fediversenews I'm pretty sure I mentioned that in my thread somewhere ... I graphed the MAU Ratio to Instance size and there isn't a relationship at all it seems (the linear regression had R^2 of basically 0). Apart from the point I mentioned about high MAU ratio instances tending to be smaller.
@fediversenews
Obviously I haven't pulled the whole database down, but having poked around the fedidb page a bit, I haven't seen any other instance other than a *key instance have the sort of growth trend that #mastodonsocial has had the past few months, which is nuts given how big it already is.
Like, there's a clearly a centralisation event occurring here likely to only get bigger given the defaults in the app, and also likely willfully chosen by many of the users.
@fediversenews
As far as the really big instances go (which are the only ones that can compete with mastodon.social in the mid-term), this is the clearly largest instance also growing the fastest.
Even misskey.io, whose growth is nuts (~30%/mnth), in absolute terms that's the same as mastodon.social's (~50k users /mnth) where mastodon.social is >5x bigger than misskey.io and clearly positioning itself to grow more as the openly default mastodon instance.
@maegul@fediversenews sure. There is one #active sever the number one. But place three is also great! Its not the members that count. Its the activities. And the #education#edutooters are active on mastodon.education. so proud of it. To bad @Gargron wont add my server to join.mastodon.org
@maegul #mastodonsocial is never willfully preferred by newcomers over other instances. They don't even know what instances are at that point.
mastodon.social is only so big and growing so quickly because there's more and more railroading going on. First, it was only convenience: It's the biggest instance with the most action, and when you wanted to invite someone over from Twitter, you didn't have to look up a matching instance for them. Just railroad them to mastodon.social and let them spend three months or so believing that mastodon.social is Mastodon.
However, a key component in the on-boarding of new users is the official Mastodon app. What do you do when you want to join a new online service? You install the app with the same name from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. In this case, it's the official Mastodon app. Just about nobody (except for me and a few other übergeeks) uses the desktop or F-Droid.
And the official Mastodon app currently railroads new users hard straight to mastodon.social, not even shying away from black patterns.
@jupiter_rowland@maegul #mastodonsocial
And then there are the not so much "übergeeks", just real professionals who have so much stuff on phones for professional reasons . . . . . . and only using desktop browser
What is it exactly, you are complaining about ?
I'm just saying that, unlike what @maegul said in the post I've replied to, newcomers don't deliberately choose #mastodonsocial over other instances. They're either not given a choice in the first place, or they're being steered towards mastodon.social by not making them want to look up other instances (or what instances are).
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