this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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The author examined the distribution of instances in the fediverse. Given that many instances are hidden behind CDNs like Cloudflare or Fastly, the author employed ActivityPub's functionality to discover the actual hosting locations of servers. More than half (51%) of the fediverse is hosted within a single hosting company. The author suggests that the fediverse hosted mostly with a few major providers, deviates from its initial objectives.

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Not to give any judgement on whether usage of a CDN is good or bad. But I think it is a bad idea to talk about decentralized hosting and decentralized ownership like they are identical. The problem with social media the fediverse is solving isn't that all social media goes down when CloudFlare/Facebook CDN goes down. It's to be independent of one organisation or even person that can ruin the fun for everyone. If CloudFlare bans every instance, the owners are still in control of their DNS names and can just move to another CDN or their own reverse proxy/cache

[–] [email protected] 68 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Whoever wrote this blog post missed the point in the way the fediverse is decentralised.

It's not about hosting. It's about ownership. And that means hosting can change at any moment. Because no one company decides anything.

That's why we really want the fediverse. Because it's not build for late stage capitalism and monopolies.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago

I always feel like whenever someone complains about fedi not being fully decentralized because they perceived too many instances as being held under a single place, they miss the point a little bit in terms of prioritizing infrastructure over user governance.

Aside from the potential disasters happening at them, it just really doesn't feel like a problem if most people are hosting an instance on a popular cloud platform. These are companies that are just providing infrastructure, and as long as you aren't trying to abuse their network or spread anything that they consider to be harmful, they won't really care.

Instances operated under Home and business ISPs aren't particularly immune to this either. And can still cut off an instance if they decide to.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

@[email protected] being behind Cloudflare does not stop an instance being decentralised at all. I have a very small site that I can only afford a little money to host it. Although it is "behind" Cloudflare, it is hosted in the UK. That hosting is decentralised. Without a CDN my instance could not exist unless I had a ton of cash to pay for superfast hosting.

None of this makes my site "centralised".

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

You can change hosting if you still own the domain

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

I always see ActivityPub as a simple glue to existing model of social media networks.

If we want to decentralize further and further the end goal would be a serverless message format with public/private key cryptography build on something like Yggdrasil or GnuNET network.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Just by looking at the biggest instances someone could think that they cover most of the users but I'm positively shocked.

Kudos for the work!

But the summary is missleading.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Is an instance its AZ? It’s SSD? Or its networking? Or its moderation?