Easiest answer would be some kind of small FOSS tool/script that makes switching instances easy and automated. Make it easy for people already on there to do their part towards fixing this in three clicks if they want.
Mastodon already natively supports moving profiles between instances. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
Posts don’t move with you though (yet?)
100%. Make migrations really easy and the problem fixes itself. To the extent people want to leave m.s. Some people don’t want to leave and trying to force them to or make it impossible to join m.s is a great way to push people to nonfederated social media.
It’s interesting to see how the Fediverse has gone the opposite way, with Lemmy.world in slow decline as a proportion of active users.
They’d do good to close down registrations for some months, let other servers grow
Anecdote: I joined Mastodon about a year ago, bc I wanted to participate in the monsterdon watch party. After about a month of “analysis paralysis”, I joined a non-mastodon.social instance. And I participated in the watch party, i.e. commenting as we all started watching a movie at the same time. But all my posts showed up like 3-4 hours late! So I made an account on mastodon.social and have been there since.
Mastodon.social is too big to defederate. Any instance that does would be undesirable to most people.
What is the point where a network is too concentrated? My gut feeling is its when 1 instance is more than 33% of the active users. Ideally 10%?
In Threadiverse, on top of active users, you have to account for active communities. But yes, 10% feels right
Mastodon and ActivityPub in general really need a way to move profiles, not just migrate. I don’t want to have 8 different split comment/post histories and inboxes if an instance fails. This is supposedly the problem ATProto was made to fix but we see how that turned out
This is being worked on: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/115376513498494866
So obviously the devs are going to start listening to users and make following accounts and searching for content across instances easier and more streamlined… r-r-right?! RiGhT???
There is a reason that things happen. Oh well, hopefully they pull their heads out of their asses before Bluesky pisses off its user base and they miss yet another major migration wave.
The graph doesn’t actually say what the y-axis is showing. Percentage of what? User accounts? Active user accounts? Posts? Interactions?
If mastodon.social is the default instance for new users, it could just have a load of inactive accounts of people who tried it and didn’t stick. Or it could have the same number of accounts as others, but the accounts are just way more engaged in posting.
It’s impossible to tell from this graph.
Hey this actually might be a good place to ask this!
SO I have a mastodon acct but the server admin limits cache to 2w for other servers, so posts on my instance last forever and I can see the entire history of my fellow server denizens, but for everyone else I can only see the last 2w.
I’m not leaving my main acct but I would however like to create an account on a server that will let me go back the farthest on other servers. The problem so far I’ve run into is that all the “joinmasto [.] com” type sites do not mention cache just a short blurb about the server and the number of accts.
Does anyone have any good recommendations for a server that would work for me?
What about mastodon.social?
That is a contender (based solely on assumptions, as I have no idea their cache retention in reality, I just assume it’s probably “yes.”)
But then, this post is right, centralization and such. If there is another applicable instance I’d likely pick that one first, though if I can’t get any info on it I’ll surely try .social first.
