The only two design choices available aren’t “funnel everyone to mastodon.social” or “present a list of thousands of servers.” The default button could automatically round-robin a large list of servers that are known to be run by good actors. This is a solved problem. The solution is not being used, in this case, because, clearly, mastodon.social does want to grow.

#design #decentralisation #mastodon #fediverse #falseDichotomy

Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.

Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.

I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.

#decentralisation #centralisation #fediverse #SmallWeb

We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.

(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-s…)

#decentralisation #federation #fediverse #SmallWeb

What is the Small Web?

Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about: The Small Web.

^{Aral Balkan}