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Are we decentralized yet?

(arewedecentralizedyet.online)
487 points Bogdanp | 3 comments | 30 Aug 25 19:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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N_Lens ◴[31 Aug 25 00:09 UTC] No.45079147[source]▶
Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.
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1. shadowgovt ◴[31 Aug 25 01:20 UTC] No.45079481[source]▶
I'm curious if you could expand on this observation? I've heard this from other Mastodon users but I haven't seen it myself; I wonder if it varies heavily from server to server or if I've just gotten lucky.
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2. neltnerb ◴[31 Aug 25 01:55 UTC] No.45079636[source]▶
Moderation (the intent and success) varies to such a huge extent that it's practically silly to talk about moderation on Mastodon unless you mean moderation on a specific mastodon server (like mastodon.social). But moderation (the process) is intense and servers are usually community run on the change found in a spare couch (i.e. they're volunteers).

I think they do quite well considering the disparate resource levels, but some servers are effectively unmoderated while others are very comfortable; plenty are racist or other types of bigot friendly, but the infrastructure for server-level blocks is ad-hoc. Yet it still seems to work better than you'd guess.

Decentralization means whomever runs the server could be great, could just not be good at running a server, could be a religious fundamentalist, a literal cop, a literal communist, a literal nazi, etc etc. And all have different ideas of what needs moderating. There is no mechanism to enforce that "fediverse wide" other than ad-hoc efforts on top of the system.

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3. shadowgovt ◴[31 Aug 25 15:55 UTC] No.45084155[source]▶
Thank you for the clarification; that makes sense.

It is perhaps also worth noting that the Fediverse architecture does nothing to remove racists or bigots from the possibility of being found in the "fediverse" (here referring to the collection of all servers using the protocol and not the protocol itself), and... That's pretty much as-intended. Truth Social uses Mastodon as its backend; there is nothing the creators / maintainers of Mastodon could, or by design would, do to shut it off. The same architecture that makes it fundamentally impossible for Nazis to shut down a gay-friendly node makes it impossible for other people to shut down a Nazi node; there is merely the ability of each node to shield its users from the other.

That's a feature of the experiment, not a bug, and reasonable people have various opinions on that aspect of it.