this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2022
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Mastodon
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Decentralised and open source social network.
founded 4 years ago
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Seems that donation model has been working pretty well for years now. Mastodon has millions of users, and lots of active servers that largely run on donations. I haven't seen any evidence that the current approach isn't scaling.
Mastodon amortizes load by having lots of servers, and the load on these servers is a product of the sizes of social graphs the users of these servers have. So, the size of the overall network isn't actually relevant, it's how big individual user graphs grow. I doubt that's going to change dramatically going forward because you can only meaningfully follow so many people in practice. This is one of the main differences between Mastodon and centralized platforms like Twitter where the servers have to handle the entirety of the content on the platform.
The flip side is that Mastodon doesn't really lend itself well to things like celebrity accounts that have millions of followers. That's likely to be the more interesting problem going forward.
Things are definitely getting lively on Mastodon. I'm excited to see where this all goes as well. :)