1---
 2date: '2020-05-05'
 3subtitle: 'Do you even understand federation?'
 4title: Stop joining mastodon.social
 5url: 'mastodon-social'
 6---
 7
 8No, really. Do you actually understand why the Mastodon network exists,
 9and what it stands for, or are you just LARPing? If you're going to just
10cross-post from Twitter, why are you even on Mastodon?
11
12Okay, so Mastodon is a "federated network". What does that mean? You
13have a bunch of instances, each having their own userbase, and each
14instance *federates* with other instances, forming a distributed
15network. Got that? Cool. Now let's get to the problem with
16mastodon.social.
17
18mastodon.social is the instance run by the lead developer. Why does
19everybody flock to it? I'm really not sure, but if I were to hazard a
20guess, I'd say it's because people don't really understand federation.
21"Oh, big instance? I should probably join that." Herd mentality? I
22dunno.
23
24And what happens when every damn user joins just one instance? It
25becomes more Twitter, that's what. The federation is gone. Nearly all
26activity is generated from just one instance. Here are some numbers:
27
28-   Total number of users on Mastodon: \~2.2 million.
29-   Number of users on mastodon.social: 529923
30
31Surprisingly, there's an instance even bigger than
32mastodon.social---pawoo.net. I have no idea why it's so big and it's
33primarily Japanese. Its user count is over 620k. So mastodon.social and
34pawoo.net put together form over 1 million users, that's *more than* 50%
35of the entire Mastodon populace. That's nuts.[^1]
36
37And you're only enabling this centralization by joining mastodon.social!
38Really, what even *is there* on mastodon.social? Have you even seen its
39local timeline? Probably not. Join an instance with more flavor. Are you
40into, say, the BSDs? Join bsd.network. Free software? fosstodon.org. Or
41host your own for yourself and your friends.
42
43If you really do care about decentralization and freedom, and aren't
44just memeing to look cool on Twitter, then move your account to another
45instance.[^2]
46
47[^1]: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html
48
49[^2]: Go to `/settings/migration` from your instance's web page.