Mastodon has seen quite a spike lately in new user registrations and are humming (or maybe “tooting”?) somewhere around 2.5M users at the moment of writing this. Big part of this rapid growth is very much driven by mr Musk’s management over how Twitter is run. That alone would be worth of one or many blog posts but let’s focus on the web3 and de-centralization part of Mastodon (and Fediverse, the fabric under Mastodon).
If you are not familiar what Mastodon is, it can be briefly explained as Twitter run on de-centralized, open source software maintained by individuals, organizations, companies, universities etc. The key value is de-centralization, there is no single organization responsible of the network.
There seems to be something around 20-45k Mastodon servers (instances in many contexts) around, the range of estimate is pretty large but seems that there is not exact figure known and surely there are new instances launched every day. The interesting part is that how many servers there are closed, not necessarily daily but there will be some or many. Other interesting part is that if you want to protect your user alias on the network, you simply can’t as anyone can set up their own server and register your alias there. The server identifier part of your account is different but as people are used to use @aliases on Twitter, we might see some misuse of this feature for “impersonation” or other nasty tricks.
If we look at the server de-centralization part. People are used to trust on the services they start using that those will remain there no matter what, even those are free or freemium as the platform costs are covered by the exchange of user data for advertising and targeted marketing. That’s not the case with Mastodon, there is no funding automatically involved from users registering to servers. Many of the big servers are run by individuals or small players that have more idealistic reasons to run the network on their own expense. This will lead to point that there can be some large servers with 100k’s users on and when the fine day comes that the server admin thinks that it is not fun game anymore, they can shut down the server(s) without warning and the user accounts with all the content is gone. Because it was de-centralized. This raises the trust factor question related to web3, if you de-centralize, there is not one monolith that you can trust, rely or blame but it is multiplayer game with each player having their own motives.
Towards the materialization of web3 services it would be worth thinking of this aspects. This is not to point any fingers towards Mastodon or services alike, just to raise the awareness. And open up questions that should the de-centeralization as design pattern also lead to setup where users of web3 services should have role on bringing in their own storage, own resources, take part to funding of the services they consume etc. In this particular Mastodon case the federation nature of the network fabric underneath would allow setting up services that could “backup” the content on behalf of the user and allow them to move to other instances whenever they will or need to. That is very user centric solution but how to contribute to resourcing of instances. Is it going to be selling of zero party data, micropayments (with cryptos), donations or combination of all these? Time will tell but it would be interesting to hear from you readers if you have any ideas or initiatives to cover some of the concerns mentioned here.