[freewilly1040]

>>> On Mastodon, 1 million active users but only 2 thousand (0.2%) instances On Tor, 2.5 millions users but only 6 thousand (0.24%) relay servers

The problem with this counterexample is that these are fringe platforms. Thriving in their own right, resilient, but a rounding error in chat and web traffic, respectively.

In other words, those who run their own servers are the fringe of a fringe.

The content creator comparison doesn’t make sense, with centralized hosting one content creator can supply an infinite amount of consumers. Not so with hosting.

[marginalia_nu]

Should also be added that Mastodon is fairly heavy weight and designed for many tenants. The way to get participate in the fediverse is no more to run a Mastodon instance anymore than the way to take part in IRC is to run an IRC relay. For better or worse, that's just not how it's designed to work.

This is in fact one of the main reasons I'm not on mastodon, because it's such a pain in the ass to set up, and I don't want to rent my identity on the Internet.

A stark contrast is something like Gemini, where the by far most common model is small self-hosted operations.

[PragmaticPulp]

> The problem with this counterexample is that these are fringe platforms. Thriving in their own right, resilient, but a rounding error in chat and web traffic, respectively.

Which makes them the perfect place to incubate misconceptions that everybody loves hosting servers and decentralized platforms.

If all of your friends are doing it and talking about it and enthusiastic about it, it feels like everyone agrees with you. Yet these places are basically a tiny filter bubble, not an accurate cross-section of the internet or general public.