Wandering Adventure Party

Rob Ricci

I have an offer to make: do you want to run an instance on the fediverse for a group that's underrepresented here?

I'll pay the bills. Period.

I'll do admin if needed (software updates and the like). But you decide what kind of community you want it to be, so you put together the mod team.

DM me.

Rob Ricci

@folkerschamel @mmasnick @mastodonmigration @mmasnick.bsky.social

I think the contention here is that Mastodon GMBH is to the Fediverse as Bluesky PBC is to the Atmosphere: both individual companies develop software, run services with users, and participate in a larger ecosystem that they don't control[*]. Each company can be called a "central" entity, and the whole can be said to contain parts that are outside that center. This is the point that I understand Mike to be making that he thinks you are missing or confused about.

At some level, this is correct. But I think this is a very shallow reading. If you look at the actual structure of these networks, they are very different. A large majority of the Fediverse is not subject to Mastodon GMBH's operational decisions (TOS, federation decisions, etc. ). There are other projects that rival the software produced by Mastodon GMBH in both scope and userbase. The pressures that shape the Fediverse are much larger *outside* of Mastodon GMBH that the ones that come from the company. There are tens of thousands of people in the Fediverse who, for better or worse, are social network administrators. Decisions are made by a huge set of people. atproto envisions a world where these things *could* happen - but so far as I know none of them are true of it today.

I think it is a major mistake to gloss over these differences.

[*] I think we will all concede that Bluesky does currently have significant control over the larger ecosystem through its control over atproto, but I am willing to give them the assumption of good faith in terms of handing off that control; they've started, and I assume they will complete the process.

Rob Ricci

@folkerschamel @mmasnick @mastodonmigration @mmasnick.bsky.social

Interesting post, thanks. I didn't cross-check the fedipact data against another source, that's probably part of our discrepancy, but the data from them does add up to about 900k MAU, so I don't know why it's such a big discrepancy. Anyway, we agree that this represents highly-decentralized decision making in action, right?

I think I'm more optimistic about credible exit than you are, part of the goal is not just that people will move, but that it will discourage individual platforms from taking actions that will piss users off. That said, I think it absolutely does not *guarantee* decentralization or user-positive behavior. The web search market has great credible exit, yet Google is staying around 90% (depending on source) even while making a lot of people quite angry about various things.

Rob Ricci

@folkerschamel @mmasnick @mastodonmigration @mmasnick.bsky.social

Here's an illustration of the difference (in agreement with your basic point).

Threads is currently blocked by servers representing 31% of Fediverse MAU and muted by another 2.5%. (Data from https://fedipact.veganism.social/ )

That's the independent decisions of 3,280 instances. Several thousand others chose to federate.

Let's say the atmosphere had the same decision to make. One organization's decision re: whether or not Thread's PDSes on their relay would affect >99% of atmosphere users.

Mike will probably say that Bluesky might fragment, with people who don't like its decision, whichever way it goes, moving to services that make a different decision. Yes, it might. And they would get to take their data with them, which is great, and they can still communicate with the people who stay behind.

But I gotta say, these seem to me like very different decision making processes with respect to whether power is held centrally or distributed to independent actors.

Rob Ricci

@folkerschamel @mmasnick @mastodonmigration @mmasnick.bsky.social

Centralization is not binary the way you're presenting it here.

Let's say we have a 400M-user Threads and a 1M-user Mastodon. If they defederate or Threads dies, Mastodon users loose access to 99.8% of the people they could communicate with. Ouch. But Mastodonians still have 1M people in their network so maybe it'll survive. Definitely not certain, though, that's a big cut. That's why I say a version of the Fediverse with 400M actual federated Threads users would be quite centralized.

Now, people on one side may not actually give a shit about communicating with people on the other side. Fine, the people in both networks are not gaining a lot from federation. This seems to be more or less the status of most of the Fediverse and Threads, and why I think the correct thing to do is count the number of Threads users who have actually turned on federation, not the rest of them. If they defederate (as a lot of the Fediverse has done already), not a lot of connections are cut. This is why the existence of Threads does not increase the centralization the Fediverse today. This could, of course, change. This is why one should *keep* counting the number of Threads users who federate.

Now, let's do this for Bluesky and Blacksky (in its role as a PDS, appview, and maybe soon relay). If, today, they split (say, the Bluesky relay stops talking to the Blacksky PDS and appview) or Bluesky dies, the 718 people on the BlackSky PDS lose access to the 38M people on the Bluesky PDSes: 99.999% of the people in the network. Again, maybe people on Blacksky could care less about people on Bluesky. But, given the even vaster difference in size, I'd wager that Blacksky users are pretty strongly interconnected with Bluesky users. And again, maybe this changes; in the week I've been watching, the number of users on the Blacksky PDS has gone up by about 200. Maybe it continues to grow and gets a lot bigger, that would change the dynamic. So again, this is why it's worth measuring and watching.

Rob Ricci

@mmasnick @mastodonmigration @folkerschamel @mmasnick.bsky.social Of course, it does not. It has like 50k.

Rob Ricci

@mmasnick @mastodonmigration @folkerschamel @mmasnick.bsky.social I think a better question here, Mike is *if* Threads had 400M users who were active on the fediverse, would the fediverse be more centralized?

I would say yes.