Centralized Fediverse

The title of this post sounds ironic since Fediverse was born as an alternative to centralized social networks like Facebook, Instagram and X.

Today, most users of Fediverse use the same software (Mastodon) and many instances are hosted by the same few service providers.

Even Meta with Threads is pushing in this direction (they use ActivityPub to federate, but there is no server choice).

The result is a kind of hybrid centralized fediverse that leads to problems that federation was supposed to solve.

If one Mastodon hosting service has a problem, all the instances on it have problems, if Mastodon decides to implement (or NOT implement) a new feature, most of the fediverse will be affected.

This is what I mean when I talk about the Centralized Fediverse.