12mo ago

Is the Fediverse truly decentralized? Not exactly.

blog.benjojo.co.uk Where is all of the fediverse?

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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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.

16 comments