---
template:
url: mastodon-social
title: Stop joining mastodon.social
subtitle: Do you even understand federation?
date: 2020-05-05
---

No, really. Do you actually understand why the Mastodon network exists,
and what it stands for, or are you just LARPing? If you're going to just
cross-post from Twitter, why are you even on Mastodon?

Okay, so Mastodon is a "federated network". What does that mean? You
have a bunch of instances, each having their own userbase, and each
instance _federates_ with other instances, forming a distributed
network. Got that? Cool. Now let's get to the problem with
mastodon.social.

mastodon.social is the instance run by the lead developer. Why does
everybody flock to it? I'm really not sure, but if I were to hazard
a guess, I'd say it's because people don't really understand federation.
"Oh, big instance? I should probably join that." Herd mentality?
I dunno.

And what happens when every damn user joins just one instance? It becomes
more Twitter, that's what. The federation is gone. Nearly all activity
is generated from just one instance. Here are some numbers:

- Total number of users on Mastodon: ~2.2 million.
- Number of users on mastodon.social: 529923

Surprisingly, there's an instance even bigger than
mastodon.social -- pawoo.net. I have no idea why it's so big and it's
primarily Japanese. Its user count is over 620k. So mastodon.social and
pawoo.net put together form over 1 million users, that's _more than_ 50%
of the entire Mastodon populace. That's nuts.[^federation-fallacy]

[^federation-fallacy]: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html

And you're only enabling this centralization by joining mastodon.social! Really, what
even _is there_ on mastodon.social? Have you even seen its local
timeline? Probably not. Join an instance with more flavor. Are you into,
say, the BSDs? Join bsd.network. Free software? fosstodon.org. Or host
your own for yourself and your friends. 

If you really do care about decentralization and freedom, and aren't
just memeing to look cool on Twitter, then move your account to another
instance.[^move-account]

[^move-account]: Go to `/settings/migration` from your instance's web
     page.