cross-posted from: https://lemmy.perthchat.org/post/302114

let’s address the possibility that like mastodon/matrix 99% of ppl will flock to the biggest handful of servers

What is the real value of decentralization given that? Outside of like political unrest.

And what role do small servers really do in that landscape? Obv “novelty” servers like midov cater to the like lolicon enthusiasts and I’m sure there are a few other servers dedicated to illegal things. Regional severs are quite compatible with various nationalists/patriots

  • Kichae@kbin.social
    10·
    1 year ago

    We actually see it happening on Mastodon.

    Yes, the marquee server gets the bulk of the new signups, but accounts that are actually active long-term end up migrating to other instances all of the time. New users are seen to acclimate to the idea of the network, and if they’re inclined do often end up looking for a home that’s better suited to their interests.

    They start at the big stop, generate their social graph, and then migrate. And there’s nothing wrong with this pattern, especially in the face of the pathological frictionlessness that corporate social media has fetishized and promoted.

    • branchial@feddit.de
      1·
      1 year ago

      Oh yeah that makes sense. I thought it would be a Galton-Watson process like the one that led social media to mainly consist of 5 websites posting interactions on one to the other.

      • Kichae@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        It almost certainly would be if account migration wasn’t possible.

        I think we’d see even more migration if Mastodon had post migration. I don’t personally get why people are so hung up on that one, but, then, I’ve probably just been broken from a decade of having my favourite online communities die at the feet of Reddit.

        It’ll be interesting to see what happens with post migration once Calckey 14 goes gold. It could end up being adopted by other non-Mastodon microblogging servers, and then a shift not just away from mastodon.social could occur, but away from Mastodon the product. Not such a big one that it would topple the beast, as it were, but a big enough one to ensure the ecosystem remains healthy.

        • NateSwift@beehaw.org
          1·
          1 year ago

          It almost It almost certainly would be if account migration wasn’t possible.

          This is possible? Does it work with Lemmy instances or only other fediverse apps? Unfortunately web searches come up almost exclusively with moving from reddit to lemmy when looking for account migration stuff :/

          • Kichae@kbin.social
            2·
            1 year ago

            AFAIK, you can’t migrate lemmy accounts yet. I believe it’s a planned feature.

            But you can absolutely migrate Mastodon accounts to other Mastodon servers, or to some other server types (Calckey I know for sure). You can’t migrate posts, though. Calckey has an experimental feature for importing posts, but I believe it puts a pretty heavy load on the site.