this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2022
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Disagree. There are already thousands of mastodon instances; having one more doesn't have a huge effect. And the downside, as I mentioned, is reinforcing mastodon's hegemony, which is a net negative for the fediverse. Organization/company instances have a wider reach than small instances and so does their choice of software, especially when that organization is one that stands for openness and decentralization.
There is no mastodon hegemony and won't be in near future. The hegemony is Twitter, Facebook etc. While they are dominant other fediverse projects don't compete with each other, they compete with centralized social sites.
This is demonstrably not true. Check any of the network trackers like https://fediverse.party. You'll see mastodon instances greatly outnumber instances of every other fediverse software combined and mastodon users greatly outnumber users of every other software as well. And the mastodon team uses this to their advantage. There are myriad instances of the mastodon team deciding not to implement greater compatibility with other (perfectly spec compliant) implementations because it would be too much work for mastodon (there's an outstanding issue about lemmy compatibility that the masto team has no interest in fixing). Webfinger is a defacto requirement for the fediverse because mastodon won't interoperate with (perfectly spec compliant) implementations that don't use webfinger. Check https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ and you'll see alot of AP development is focused specifically on interoperability with mastodon. Brand new implementations start off testing against Mastodon and only test against other services later (if at all).
That is a hegemony and because of it, Mastodon receives more contributions, has a larger patreon, and receives more public funding than any other AP service. The fediverse is powerful because of its diversity, but if its controlled by a single project, that project can dictate its direction and capabilities.
I agree. And the hegemony is getting stronger by the day. The announcement in The Guardian about Mozilla for instance has this headline: "Firefox and Tumblr join rush to support Mastodon social network". Not Fediverse, but "The Mastodon Social Network". And I continue to see new fedizens tooting elightened thoughs that there's more than Mastodon, yet still getting it wrong (e.g. "There are more social networks than Mastodon on the Fediverse, like Pleroma").
Potential of Fediverse is for the creation of a single interoperable "social fabric". I wrote about this in Let's Reimagine Social. How the Fediverse can enable a Peopleverse, which also entails de-emphasizing the role of individual apps, which are like siloes. App-free Computing is possible.
I have been moderator of SocialHub for a couple of years. Mastodon contributors only sporadically interact in that dev community. I cannot blame them for that. They naturally care most about their own FOSS project, and furthermore that is a Microblogging app, so why care about different app types? The major challenges of maintaining open standards in a grassroots movement are all social in nature (though they may have partially social-technical solutions) and tackling how FOSS projects can be incentivized to collaborate beyond their own direct project boundary.
Btw, for anyone interested in a good overview of fedi projects, I co-maintain the 3 fedi-related delightful lists.