anyone have any idea what happened here?
5.6k servers shutting down in a month is a lot, but it is not reflected in other stats. im not convinced yet that there were 5k servers out there being actively used by real people that could all shut down without people noticing it in other ways
A quick comparison between how people like Paul and Hailey can Post, versus how Eugen or the Lemmy devs post, as well as the active user numbers between these platforms make me just ever so slightly doubtful of this claim
This is why I included a section on Mastodon in my article on how Bluesky is not distributed in a social sense. Its much easier to deal with on Bluesky because of the explicit nature of the centralisation points.
The fediverse is absolutely failing at decentralisation here: we are clearly centralised on one of the aspects that actually matter, and handed power over to a dictator-for-life who refuses accountability
I think the core question for the fediverse is now how the community will regroup and reorient itself now that its becoming clear that it will not be the new destination for people looking for an alternative to X
The fediverse does not have to be a public-global townsquare twitter-like, instead we can built new types of networked communities
People saying things like 'this large account is our Algorithm' or 'this big account is our Starter Pack' does not exactly bode confidence in the whole decentralisation thing tbh
No shade to these accounts, they do impressive and hard work and have massively contributed to the community.
Its just that promoting single accounts for a specific purpose of either content or account discovery is hugely centralising around them?
