Decentralised Social Network growing rapidly, without us.

These past weeks have been quite extraordinary.

The federated social network and microblogging system Mastodon has been growing at an incredible rate as users migrate away from Twitter.

We see that it crossed 6,132,414 users today and is growing at over 5k/hour. See here for stats: https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount

Thousands of new instances are being set up.

This is quite phenomenal for a decentralised, federated network running on open source software, where anyone can run their own node instance.

Academics are coordinating to move to mastodon en masse. Journalists too are moving. A lot of effort is going in to this and a lot of experimentation / hands-on improvisation: They are even passing around text files and google docs full of account names so that people can recreate their twitter networks on mastodon. It's humans instead of AIs suggesting accounts to follow.

This week has seen articles on how to get set up on mastodon in wired, wired2, the guardian, time, nytimes, bbc, and so many more..

The trigger for this has been the turmoil at Twitter. But whatever the cause, and whatever you think about Elon Musk making Twitter his personal property, I would have expected this community to be excited about a mass movement to Mastodon, and actively encouraging it / joining in. Surely this community understands that a decentralised social network in which moderation is local/opt-in, in which you can move your account to another node at any time and keep your followers, in which you can run your own node, that this is an extremely valuable thing in itself, and that it opens the space up to so much more development, improvement, and experimentation.

Instead, I find that among my followings, everyone except the crypto crowd is trying to decentralise while this community just shrugs.

It might not be a web3 utopia, but its a lot better than one privately owned network. Here is a chance to move things in the right direction… and yet ..

Why? Shouldn't we give it a go? Try it out? It's open source. Adding ENS authentication is one PR away. Adding IPFS/Swarm support is one PR away. We can even host our own instances to experiment while still being connected to the wider network.

I'd love to see you all over there!