Yeah, that’s definitely a problem. One reason I think is that now you are by default signed up for mastodon.social, which results in a huge mastodon.social.

Maybe. One can hope. In the end though, my impression of how the broad structure of the fediverse has panned out is that we really shouldn’t underestimate the tendency for people to centralise.

I also think that most people are so used to centralized services by now. Like, I’m not blaming them for being immature, but there is still a long way to go for people to become mature digital actors. That’s a big problem.

I hope that much of this will even itself out as the Fediverse grows. With Threads, soon there will be another big player in the Fediverse that will be the next center of it :D

My personal opinion is that

1. We need to get more people in the Fediverse
2. We need to educate people in the Fediverse towards more digital agency

If we get this done, the Fediverse grows heathily. But I think this will not happen necessarily with Threads joining. The people there are quite comfortable with their central services.

Instead, we should try to ally with the traditional communities of the web. I would be for Harry Potter fans, because they are themselves able to create their own spaces on the web, as they have managed to do for many years. There should be one or multiple Harry Potter-themed instances that attract H.P. fans and at the same time promote digital agency.

Well, because it has some interesting aspects and I’m a curious person. Also, I don’t think solarpunk is necessarily socialist. For example universalist Marxists, with which I have many symphasizes, would (imo) come up with the same conclusion that liberal democracy is the best system currently, because it allows for the co-existence of a broad range of different lifestyles and forms of communities - if we allow them to grow and not let the market decide everything for us.

From a political stance, I would call myself a traditional liberalist, like in the tradition of the enlightenment. This means I’m against a global socialist system, because I don’t think it can work and allow this diversity of lifestyles. What we share I think is that I’m also against neo-liberalism. But if one of the many decentralized communities that are part of MY future of society, decides for example to distribute their goods with big data - I’m all for that. I’m curious to see how things will develop here even though I wouldn’t like join a solarpunk commune or anything.

Ok, I see. Thing is, I don’t believe this stateless, hierarchy-less society to be possible. At least not on a global level. So for me it always results in replacing the ruling class with another ruling class, which makes it authoritarian to me.

Broadly speaking, the ability of the user’s choices to organically grow and connect the open social space that the article talks about is still very restricted IMO. And there is probably a fair way to go technologically before the foundations are even there.

I would agree that the Fediverse will probably need to change and that most people on the Fediverse are currently not ready to accept that change. However, I think that it only partially technological and primarily social.

Basically, you critizize the concept of “instances”. Basically, instances are currently synonmymous with “Server”, but they are actually describing something different: a place on the web with a distinct space of rules and standards. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it HAS to be a single server. It could also be group of servers with the same shared policy.

For example, maybe in the future, the “Solarpunk” instance, will be a conglomerate of several servers that share certain community standards, now, if one server does something bad, people are leaving this server and in the worst case, other defederate from it/it gets kicked out of the instance.

This can all happen with the underlying technology. It’s all already there. Basically, imo the main thing is about creating societal protocolls on top of technological infrastructure. I don’t even think that one can expect some technological solution for this. It sounds like “solutionism” to me. Its like saying: the IP protocoll is responsible for the centralization of the web and how can we change it to make it more decentral? Its just as dezentral as it should be. imo the same holds for activitypub. Its what you make of it.

Part of the problem here is that the big-social mega-corp monopolisation of social media was so bad and so long lasting that we’ve atrophied the muscles of social organisation. Collectively and behaviourally, we don’t really know how to do this or how to talk and think about it (personally I think the conversation around Threads and whether to de-fed shows signs of this).

Couldn’t agree more

I hear you, but it certainly requires certain skills to run an instance. It’d be curious to think about what the IRL equivalents are. My mind immediately goes to booking rooms/venues for events and sending emails, and then for digital, starting a discord/slack or Facebook group or subreddit, all of which also isn’t particularly hard and doesn’t require special skills.

But as the Fediverse professionalizes, this will only get easier. At some point, network effect will kick in and you just want to be a part of that. Yes, you could just make a discord server, but with a little more effort, you make a fediverse instance, where you already have a huge potential of possible users.

The threat here could be of course, that this professionalization comes again with centralization, for example with a service like Wordpress, where you can easily setup your own Mastodon instance (not ideal). But I’m confident that the counter-culture in the Fediverse will work against that.

I wonder why there isn’t a H.P. themed one yet. It seemes like one of the first you would expect

But effectively, Marxism is about a violent uprising of the worker class and then this working class rules, right? So that’s kind of authoritarian. Stalin is of course in the most left, most top corner.

:D That’s sweet. I will think about it