Discussion
I want the #Fediverse to grow. But out of curiosity, how well would the Fediverse scale? What would happen if the current user base increased by a factor of 10, 100, or 1000?
And if the answer is "bad things", what would need to be done to make the Fediverse cope with such an expanded user base?
(For the purpose of this thought exercise, assume that each specific Fediverse software implementation would likewise multiply their user base by this factor, albeit spread out over more instances.)
While true, the challenge of moderation should not be underestimated.
@juergen_hubert exactly. That is why it is essential to not rely on big servers. Effective moderation does not scale linearly for any given instance.
Say you have a pretty big server with 10 moderators. It becomes a challenge to moderate consistently due not only disagreement amongst moderators but also the diversity of the people using that server. Furthermore big servers are bigger points of failure where bad management can cause a high impact defederation.
But, if you have 10 smaller servers each with just one moderator but together supporting the same number of people there is more flexibility in moderation policies to address the diverse needs of those people.
There is a sweet spot between like a dozen to a few hundred people per server. If you went full peer to peer (basically all single user instances) it doesn't foster community. Get bigger than 500 or so then you start having the challenges above.
@juergen_hubert I think a lot will depend on the pace and direction of expansion. A rapid and purely user-driven expansion, as happened with changes to commercial platforms (the Twitter-X transition being a primary example) is likely to result in more centralization and capacity issues as existing instances scramble to catch up to the demand. A slower expansion of instances and admins ahead of a gradual increase in users is likelier to result in an easier adaptation, both technically and culturally. I believe the latter is the healthier direction, but I'm not sure how likely it is in the short term given existing skill/cost barriers and the heavily inflated price of memory. I'm not even optimistic about how much longer the fediverse can exist as an indie space, given the pressures surrounding compliance and age verification.
@juergen_hubert I'm pretty sure that the safety tools will require a great deal of rethinking.
Currently safety is dumped as a workload onto instance owners; instance owners who are not given any reasonable tools for doing that job. I'm an admin over here, for example, on gamerplus and in July to August we got flooded by a bunch of AI-based bot-made accounts. It was a daily chore to go through the new accounts and decided quickly if a new account was a fake bot account or a real one.
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@juergen_hubert Of use would be databases of known bad ID patterns, known bad email hosts, known bad actors, etc. that we could use to just automatically nix accounts without even having a human in the loop except for checking out the final decision.
We're small enough that harassment isn't much of an issue; we had one person once make an account as part of a process of harassing people in a personal crusade. But I can see how a larger instance with more breadth could get hammered by it.
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@juergen_hubert the obvious one is that it would need proportionately more moderators and that's already a lot of work for a lot of volunteers.
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@juergen_hubert people need to stop thinking of the fediverse as an application or platform (like mastodon or microblogging) and stop worrying about growth in terms of active users.
Fedi is best thought of as *infrastructure*, because at its heart is a suite of generalised and extensible protocols that allow servers and the people that use them to deeply interact. If any growth metric is important it would he number of servers more than number of users.
If viewed from this perspective it could scale globally. If we scaled to 1000x the servers with a large diversity of platforms it would flourish and be very resilient. If we instead had each server currently in existence get 1000x more users and we only had like 6 popular fedi platforms it wound be at risk of collapse! Big instance==high maintenance and hard to moderate!
That is why fedi has more potential than ATmosphere (bluesky) because the latter depends heavily on huge scalable relays and labellers and apps. Many small simple servers is key!