Although the account suspension of palestinian news site #Mondoweiss from mastodon.social has been lifted, this unavoidably brings us back to the discussion about Mastodon's decision to suggest its own server for new registrations on its app. What happened to Mondoweiss (to be banned from a server with over 1.6M members - so a large slice of total #fediverse members) is a reminder of how problematic centralization can be. The intention might have been to offer easier onboarding, but even if the goal was to not ask users to choose for a server, maybe they could at least have gone for example with "Random server" by default, and choose out of a list of trusted and long lasting servers. What they are doing now is practically use the software's success to make one privately owned server disproportionately bigger than thousands of servers combined, controlling a significant percentage of fediverse users.

I'm not questioning #Mastodon's intentions, but in practice this is what happens, as a factual result. I can't help but point out that this can be problematic. Power and control over users should be minimized in the fediverse - this is one of the main things that we should be trying to avoid by being here, and it's a matter of numbers as well. Support smaller servers. Move to smaller servers (with a good reputation, if possible). Host your own server, if you know how to, or sign up for a managed hosting solution, if you can afford it. We should be spread out, for this to work as well as it should.