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