3w ago

Decentralization Scoring System (v1.3)

🧮 Decentralization Scoring System (v1.3)

This scoring system evaluates how decentralized and self-hostable a platform is, based on four core metrics.

📊 Scoring Metrics (Total: 100 Points)

Metric	Weight	Description
Top Provider User Share	30	Measures how many users are on the largest instance. Full points if <20%; 0 if >80%.
Top Provider Content Share	30	Measures how much content is hosted by the largest instance. Full points if <20%; 0 if >80%.
Ease of Self-Hosting: Server	20	Technical ease of running your own backend. Full points for simple setup with good docs.
Ease of Self-Hosting: User Interface	20	Availability and usability of clients. Full points for accessible, FOSS, multi-platform clients.

📋 Example Breakdown (Estimates)

Platform	Score	Visualization
📧 Email	95	🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🐹 Lemmy	79	🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🐘 Mastodon	74	🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟣 PeerTube	94	🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🖼 Pixelfed	42	🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧
🔵 Bluesky	14	🟥🟥🟥
🟥 Reddit	3	🟥

📧 Email

Top Provider User Share: Google ≈ 17% → Score: 30/30
Top Provider Content Share: Google handles ≈ 17% of mail → Score: 30/30
Self-Hosting: Server: Easy (Can leverage hundreds of email hosting options) → Score: 16/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Easy (Thunderbird, K-9, etc.) → Score: 19/20

Total: 95/100

🐹 Lemmy

Top Provider User Share: lemmy.world ≈ 37% → Score: 21.5/30
Top Provider Content Share: lemmy.world hosts ≈ 37% content → Score: 21.5/30
Self-Hosting: Server: Easy (Docker, low resource) → Score: 18/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Good FOSS apps, web UI → Score: 18/20

Total: 79/100

🐘 Mastodon

Top Provider User Share: mastodon.social ≈ 40% → Score: 20/30
Top Provider Content Share: mastodon.social ≈ 45–50% content → Score: 20/30
Self-Hosting: Server: Docker setup, moderate difficulty → Score: 15/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Strong ecosystem (Tusky, web, etc.) → Score: 19/20

Total: 74/100

🟣 PeerTube

Top Provider User Share: wirtube.de ≈ 14% → Score: 30/30
Top Provider Content Share: Approximately 14% → Score: 30/30
Self-Hosting: Server: Docker, active community, moderate resources → Score: 16/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Web-first UI, FOSS, some mobile options → Score: 18/20

Total: 94/100

🖼 Pixelfed

Top Provider User Share: pixelfed.social ≈ 71% → Score: 4.5/30
Top Provider Content Share: Approximately 71% → Score: 4.5/30
Self-Hosting: Server: Laravel-based, Docker available, some config needed → Score: 15/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Web UI, FOSS, mobile apps in progress → Score: 18/20

Total: 42/100

🔵 Bluesky

Top Provider User Share: bsky.social ≈ 99% → Score: 0/30
Top Provider Content Share: Nearly all content on bsky.social → Score: 0/30
Self-Hosting: Server: PDS hosting possible but very niche and poorly documented → Score: 4/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Mostly official client; some 3rd party → Score: 10/20

Total: 14/100

🟠 Reddit

Top Provider User Share: Reddit hosts 100% of user accounts → Score: 0/30
Top Provider Content Share: Reddit hosts all user-generated content → Score: 0/30
Self-Hosting: Server: Not self-hostable (proprietary platform) → Score: 0/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Some unofficial clients available → Score: 3/20

Total: 3/100

How Scores are Calculated

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 How User/Content Share Scores Work

This measures how many users are on the largest provider (or instance).

No provider > 20%: If no provider has more than 20%, it gets full 30 points.
Between 20% and 80%: Anything in between is scored on a linear scale.
> 80%: If a provider has more than 80%, it gets 0 points.

📊 Formula:

Score = 30 × (1 - (TopProviderShare - 20) / 60)
…but only if TopProviderShare is between 20% and 80%.
If below 20%, full 30. If above 80%, zero.

📌 Example:

If one provider has 40% of all users:
→ Score = 30 × (1 - (40 - 20) / 60) = 30 × (1 - 0.43) = 17.1 points

🖥️ How Ease of Self-Hosting Scores Work

These scores measure how easy it is for individuals or communities to run their own servers or use clients.

This looks at how technically easy it is to run your own backend (e.g., email server, Mastodon server) or User Interface (e.g., web-interface or mobile-app)

Very Easy: One-command or setup wizard, great documentation → 18–20 points
Moderate: Docker or manual setup, some config, active community support → 13–17 points
Hard: Complex setup, needs regular updates or custom config, poor documentation → 6–12 points
Very Hard or Proprietary: Little to no self-hosting support, undocumented → 0–5 points

📚 Sources

📧 Email W3Techs – Email Server Overview
🐹 Lemmy
Fedidb – Lemmy Software Stats
🐘 Mastodon
Fedidb – Mastodon Software Stats
🟣 PeerTube
Fedidb – PeerTube Software Stats
🖼 Pixelfed
Fedidb – Pixelfed Software Stats
🔵 Bluesky SoftwareMill – Bluesky’s Decentralized Architecture
🟥 Reddit Wikipedia - Reddit API Controversy

Footnotes

This is a work in progress and may contain mistakes. If you have ideas or suggestions for improvement, feel free to let me know.

Source: https://github.com/NoBadDays/decentralization-score/blob/main/decentralization_score_2025.04.md

12 comments

Very good ideas, but I don't agree at all with your estimations.
For example it is terribly difficult to self host email, and very few people actually do it. Contrary to your estimation. It's not because of the server software, but because of the fight against spam etc. that costs so much.
You are focusing on only one "top" and so you can't see the reality. You are scoring centralization. Not decentralization.
Better if you look at the share of hosters at the "lower end", the ones that actually do self hosting, like:
% of servers with up to 10 users (counting only natural persons).
% of users on servers with up to 10 users (counting only natural persons).
- I like the idea, but I don't really feel this is scoring decentralization at all.
  Yeah,looking through this again, it really scores centralization, and also focuses way to much on ease of setup. Which honestly has nothing to do with it. If it's super hard to setup, but every participant is hosting their own node. And producing the same amount of content. That would be max decentralization.
  I would also argue that a requirement for decentralization is that the service keeps working even if a large portion of all nodes goes down, the remaining nodes are still operational and keep delivering the value.
- For example it is terribly difficult to self host email, and very few people actually do it.
  I read this a bunch of times and put off trying it because it sounded like such a hassle. Eventually I did and... it wasn't bad at all. I just had to add a few extra DNS entries. I haven't had any delivery problems.
  
  Is it self hosted or do you pay someone else to host it? Do you have a fixed IP? I've always wanted to try and set it up but it definitely seems like one of the riskier ones if you then use it to sign up to a lot of things.

This is really cool.
It reminds me of the Edinburgh Decentralisation Index: an academically rigorous decentralization index that the university of Glasgow school of informatics devised to quanitfy the decentralization of cryptocurrencies:
The Edinburgh Decentralisation Index (EDI) studies blockchain decentralisation from first principles, archives relevant datasets, develops metrics, and offers a dashboard to track decentralisation trends over time and across systems.
https://informatics.ed.ac.uk/blockchain/edi
You should give it a serious look. IMO, it would offer some insight into academically peer-reviewed ways of quantifying this kind of thing.
- That's fascinating, Hopefully we can eventually get such a thorough breakdown of the decentralization of online services.

There are a few things I don't like about this scoring system :
Why is there a "Top Provider Content Share" metric if its gonna score the same as the "Top Provider User Share" every time ?
Why is the Top Provider Content Share not higher than the user share ? For instance, emails usually have at least one sender and one recipient, making it twice as likely that at least one of them is using gmail. If an email has 10 recipients across 10 different providers, each provider has a copy of the data
Why is ease of hosting a mail server rated so well ? How is "leveraging email hosting services" decentralized in any way ?
Why are we using a random repo created a few hours ago by a random github user as a reference ?
- In regards to email hosting.
  It is not about hosting the server on your own infrastructure, it is about having there code to host it out have another provider.
  There are a lot of email providers!
  Also, if you look at the way Lemmy works, it is the same as emails. If they federate a community, the data is kept on both the original server and the federated one, so you duplicate to m the data, similar to an email server.
  It is an interesting concept, and maybe the score should just reduce down to brush categories, like fully decentralized, potential decentralized, neither, partially centralized, fully centralized.
  Then we won't nitpick on the school l score too much?
- Why is ease of hosting a mail server rated so well ? How is “leveraging email hosting services” decentralized in any way ?
  Because somebody there doesn't even understand you're supposed to host an email server as easily as hosting a web server with a website. While in reality you'll learn all the Satanish obscene lexicon before making big email providers accept your mail.
  I'm exaggerating probably, but ahem.
  That said, in my humble careless incompetent "let's-go-back-to-year-2005" opinion we need a new email standard, spiritually same, but qualitatively different, like the upgrade from prehistoric email with UUCP paths to something more modern, only this time cutting down all the DMARC and DKIM bullshit and simply using pubkeys in To: and From: headers, with the email itself signed by the author, by mail server and maybe by something else. One can make encryption of email content the baseline norm while we're at it. One can even get rid of the attachment of identities to mail servers and use servers similar to how NOSTR has relays. I mean, what I described already is just NOSTR with nostalgic aesthetics. Maybe also similar to some kind of Fidonet reimagined.
- Why is there a "Top Provider Content Share" metric if its gonna score the same as the "Top Provider User Share" every time ?
  As said in the footer, this is a work in progress, I'm posting it to get input and still refining sources
  Why is the Top Provider Content Share not higher than the user share ? For instance, emails usually have at least one sender and one recipient, making it twice as likely that at least one of them is using gmail. If an email has 10 recipients across 10 different providers, each provider has a copy of the data
  I'd love to get better data on this, I've looked but not yet found better data than what I included in the source
  Why is ease of hosting a mail server rated so well ? How is "leveraging email hosting services" decentralized in any way ?
  Here I'm a bit in two minds, sure it's difficult to SELF host email, but in practice it isn't because there are hundreds (Thousands?) of hosting options to choose from where you can choose your own domain etc. for the low price of basically-free
  Why are we using a random repo created a few hours ago by a random github user as a reference ?
  It's my repo, it's to keep track of the versions and so that others can copy, edit and share it if they like.

Nice work.

12 comments