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Serious debate please: How is Mastodon decentralized?

Mastodon recently incorporated into a nonprofit to continue development. What I don’t understand is how can you truly say an app is decentralized when at any time an instance owner can be kicked by the powers that be from the federation. You work really hard to build up an instance then it is just pulled from the federation white list. Also, what incentives do instance owners have? Besides a rich boi server hoster for giggles what incentive to hosting your own network is there? You receive no sales, no ad revenue, no rights to use the brand for merchandise (Mastodon has seized brand sales). How can you expect a truly centralized network to grow when the weight of the network is decided by local network owners who have no financial income to sustain or grow large instances.

I think everyone including here on lemmy realizes that the only way these instances succeed is through big money. If you find out who the real power brokers that run the servers are you’ll figure out how these places survive with no income. You can’t just fund these $2,000 a month server bills on large instances without having a hedge fund behind you. I’ll just be honest if a hedge fund is behind something it probably isn’t good. In this thread we take a deep dive into Mastodon and Lemmy’s instance owners.

Full disclosure: I own my own instance, but it is with my own site (tiblur.com). I just know I would never make it without advertising revenue.

geosoco ,

Many folks running instances take donations. Folks are happy to toss up a few bucks to help cover costs. Similar to how people are happy to hop on patreon and support whatever creators on a monthly basis. That's where a lot of the core mastodon money comes from. There's also grants from orgs and governments too to contribute.

This isn't a new concept, and the internet has always had services that worked like this. Usenet, mirrored file repositories, etc. It wasn't until the early 2000s that many things started to become centralized, and we see how well that's worked out.

sknowmads ,

This guy is a troll

Dick_Justice ,
@Dick_Justice@lemmy.world avatar

Does Lemmy.World have a hedgefund?

LimitedDuck ,

Are you calling the server list on joinmastodon.org “the federation”? Because it’s not; it’s literally just a list. Nothing about the list tells you about any actual federation between instances. Without a doubt there are instances on that list that are federated with ones not on that list and vice versa. It’s not even the only list out there.

Lettuceeatlettuce ,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

$2000 a month? Not sure what kind of workload you’re thinking of. You can run an instance with several thousand users with pretty minimal hardware.

Decentralization is a matter of structure. There is no central “federation” that you speak of that can blacklist you. Getting defederated from an instance isn’t a collective descision, it’s up to the individual server owners to decide.

And the odds that you work hard to build a server up and then find yourself defenderated by all major instances is incredibly small. Normally indicates that the server is actually a pretty toxic.

theanon OP ,

Renting unlimited bandwidth is not cheap with higher storage. Btw an 8gig Ram rig with 5TB in data storage will run you about $2,000 with mid grade motherboard etc… plus $500 a month for a 30Gbps pipe.

Lettuceeatlettuce ,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

Naw. You can pick up a modern server with 24+ cores, a few hundred GB of RAM and several TB of storage for for half that or less.

VPS are more expensive, but still not that expensive. Maybe for some of the big player garbage like Azure, but not smaller players like Linode.

Veedem ,
@Veedem@lemmy.world avatar

Are you just on here to low key spam your own instance/site?

You also posted this: lemmy.world/post/5542252

theanon OP ,

No, this thread is about debate on mastodon whether it’s truly decentralized.

Veedem ,
@Veedem@lemmy.world avatar

It is. The organization doesn’t control which instances federate or defederate from others.

originalfrozenbanana ,

That’s just, like, your opinion man

theanon OP ,

Lol

thisisawayoflife ,

Simply put, one person deciding to defederate doesn’t mean anyone else has decided to defederate from you.

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