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

Server stats:

11K
active users

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.

Optimising #Mastodon = designing flows that encourage people to leave mastodon.social for other instances, not accepting any more new members on mastodon.social, and making design changes that limit how much a single instance can scale.

A single instance that can scale to host hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, is not a design success in decentralisation, it’s a design failure. (It’s a design success in #BigTech.)

CC @Gargron

Eric Prenen

@aral @Gargron True. But in order to reach viable scale, people need a single point of entry.

@eprenen @aral Yes, that's the sad reality. Convincing someone to sign up on a server hosted by someone else (especially a recognizable non-profit) is much easier than convincing them to get into self-hosting. Many people are neither capable nor willing (although SaaS offerings help, any hosting cost is a hurdle not to be discounted). We need scalable servers for the masses. Luckily the system supports both use cases.

@Gargron @eprenen @aral Cant you disable or mark a range of maximum for each servers. This won't be big effort.