Your thoughts on the concentration of users around big and flagship instances ?
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 ?
I created this tool and have been using it in my instance since the very beginning. My instance is almost 2 years old and it's total database size is 60.2GB.
What people don't understand about this tool is:
If a community is generating enough activity, it's likely that someone from your instance is already following that community.
If a community isn't generating enough activity, it won't create much of a network/storage burden anyway.
Sure, it will make a small difference, but it's nothing compared to the benefits it provides.
small instances that can have niche content, owned and operated by those users (think beehaw) but with the ability to consume/interact with content from the rest of the fediverse (onramping).