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Are we decentralized yet?

(arewedecentralizedyet.online)
487 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 19:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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d4mi3n ◴[30 Aug 25 19:39 UTC] No.45077410[source]▶
Neat! I'm not surprised at the findings here. BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter.

Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization like we've seen in the AT-Proto ecosystem.

I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon server selectively syndicating with a few peers, but I say this with only a vague understanding of the internals of both of these ecosystems.

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dom96 ◴[30 Aug 25 23:22 UTC] No.45078889[source]▶
> BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter.

One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to.

I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.

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1. shadowgovt ◴[31 Aug 25 01:18 UTC] No.45079477[source]▶
There are also significant practical user experience differences.

Doing a search on Twitter searches Twitter, the whole thing. A search on Mastodon only knows about the servers you're connected to (unless you're searching for a specific user, then it'll micro-target their server to get their account info, but you have to know their name through some side-channel. Similarly, if you chance across a Mastodon post and want to follow that user, unless you happen to be on the same node as them you have to enter your own node data to get redirected to do the follow because of the domain-based nature of web security.

These aren't deal-breakers but we have the hard numbers from other web UX to know that every time you put a friction point like these in the flow, you immediately lose some x% of users. Relative to services that are centralized, these things will slow Mastodon adoption.

(This may not be the worst thing. There are other goals besides maximizing the adoption numbers.)