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

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.[^1]

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.[^2]

[^1]: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html

[^2]: Go to `/settings/migration` from your instance's web page.