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: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)
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
@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.