mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

381K
active users

@zvavybir

Thank you for the notification! :)

What does "famously too large size" mean?

@madeindex Many people (including me) on the fediverse keep complaining that mastodon.social has too many users (> 200000), which contradicts the defederated nature of the fediverse (some of the problems of that is that it hinders in moderation and that the admins of mastodon.social have a lot of power given their position of the admin of 200000 people).

@zvavybir It feels to me like the power is already in their hands. gGmbH maintains the project and joinmastodon.org.

Have you & the others who believe this tried to raise the issue with them?

A simple solution to increase signup on other would be to remove the "Join mastodon.social" button on the official¹ and instead display a full list of servers.

¹ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon

joinmastodon.orgMastodon - Decentralized social mediaLearn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.

@madeindex This problem is well-known and raised often, but sadly no action by Eugen/the Mastodon gGmbH has been taken so far. While you are of course correct that being the official maintainers of a major software and the owners of the primary sign-up site is a lot of power, there is also a lot of power being an admin of a big instance, independent from the other things. The most pressing concern to me is that the large size means that I can't really defederate mastodon.social (I now have decided to do it anyway as the pains have become too high and I remembered ways to circumvent the worst of it (I can still subscribe to the RSS feed of the accounts I want to follow in my RSS reader and I have an old account that I can use to write to mastodon.social users if I need to)) without loosing a lot of people I care about (and losing people who want to hear from me – the list of accounts in the first post are all following me from mastodon.social), so one of the most important and potent moderation tools is effectively toothless for this one instance.

@zvavybir
You raise an important issue with the / idea of the .

The concentration of power might become an increasing issue looking into the future. If, e.g., gGmbH decided to threaten blocking unless they remove certain users, content...

Thinking about switching there are concerns of losing: SEO-wise, reach, contacts/followers, character & poll limit (😜)...

PS
seems to have a "fairer" signup process
misskey-hub.net/en/

Misskey HubMisskey Hub – Official website of the Misskey ProjectThis is the official site for Misskey, a decentralized social networking software. Find out how to get started, a list of servers, and lots more information about Misskey!

@zvavybir Your approach & the thought of switching instances somehow remind me of moving from to and eventually having to have both 😅
(as the critical mass has not seemed to be reached yet)

currently seems to face a more immediate, more dramatic issue, though.

The active & count are continuously dropping:
mastodon-analytics.com/

Mastodon AnalyticsMastodon AnalyticsHow many users, active users, servers are on Mastodon?

@madeindex The user and server drop is pretty much independent of this issue and needs to be addressed separately. (also I'm not completely convinced it's true give the data on the website, it seems pretty steady.)

@madeindex The reason could be that mastodon-analystics.com potentially only looks at mastodon instances, while fedidb looks at all fediverse instances.