(2023-04-24) Garrison Mastodon Is Doomed

Juston Garrison: Mastodon Is Doomed. In an ideal fediverse world, people would run personal servers or a community would run a server for members. The reality is people don’t want to pick their favorite community, running an instance is expensive and complicated, and owning your data isn’t a product feature.

Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale.

Communities are not siloed independent bubbles. People are Venn diagrams of lots of communities and interests.

Even one of the best run instances at hachyderm.io had trouble scaling last year with 30,000 users and over $5000 worth of equipment. They were able to migrate over a terabyte of data to Digital Ocean which kept them afloat, but at a cost not many can afford—more than $1000/mo.

Just like Wordpress from the 2010s, many instances will be abandoned and never upgraded. Like Wordpress, the best way to use Mastodon is to pay a company to run it for you

On average it cost $.0085 per registered account and $.041 per MAU

The financial and trust models of Mastodon just don’t add up.

You can, of course, run your own server. Just like you can run your own email server. And you will be blocked from the broader public discourse just the same. There will be no way for large instances to trust and allow every individual instance.

The only way I would suggest running an instance is with a managed services option like Cloudflare Wildebeest .

Eugen has no plans for monetization beyond donations and running instances for interested users. While I highly respect Eugen’s technical abilities and drive and determination to build such an ambitious product on top of ActivityPub, I believe the vision is flawed.

If mastodon is to be the poster child of the fediverse it needs to drastically simplify the requirements to run and maintain an instance. There should be a single binary, self-updating, single-user instance. (But he said further up these wouldn't get federated!)

Instead Mastodon is going in the exact opposite direction. The Mastodon company has fewer than 10 employees and is moving the largest mastodon instance to Kubernetes.

Will there be simpler and cheaper options? I don’t think so. Mastodon growth is already starting to plateau. All of the 3rd party integrations are happening with ActivityPub, not Mastodon.

It’s a more expensive and questionably better RSS.