So most of the new #mastodon growth was taken up by mastodon.social … right?
See
https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon … which doesn’t provide recent numbers by time, but does if you go into individual instances, such as mastodon.world, where you can see user growth mainly occurred on mastodon.social.
I imagine some users have also returned, bumping MAU but perhaps a little more distributed.
Along with lemmy.world, it looks like “centralisation” is relatively natural.
It’s because normies want that “centralized” experience. They don’t want to figure out which servers are federated with which server - but they always know that they will have the least issues with the server that has the most active users.
Well there’s also the controversial situation of the mastodon app defaulting to mastodon.social (their own mega instance) for signing up a new user.
The move triggered some negative noise when it happened, but obviously nothing changed, and since then mastodon.social, already the biggest instance by far, has quietly sucked up most of the growth. Except that growth was gradual, whereas this episode may highlight how much of a funnel that default is.
All that being said … yes … the centralisation on lemmy.world really demonstrates that an app default is probably a minor factor.
Though, in the case of lemmy, I think we’ve landed on a better arrangement where the core devs aren’t running the big central instance, which was by their design, and so we’ve got more of a distribution of vested interests and feedback which should lead to a healthier ecosystem than otherwise.
Centralization reduces friction. Normies who sign up on Mastodon are going to want to be able to talk to all of the other Twitter refugees too. By making mastodon.social the default, it encourages centralization of the mainstream portion of Mastodon’s userbase, such as journalists, official company accounts, public figures, etc.
But most of them are probably going to use BlueSky. I heard journalists have been mostly gravitating towards that option.