Fediverse: Small Instance Pipedream

§ small-instance fedi pipedream

It’s often brought up that you should avoid mega instances such as mastodon.social and you should use small instances operated by people you trust, or, if possible, single-user instance.

While I do agree with that, how does this small-instance utopian scale?

  1. your home server needs to “broadcast” your statuses to all the servers that host your followers. If each of your N followers is on their own server then the request is multiplied by N.

  2. your home server needs to store copies of all the incoming statuses in the database and technically they are treated the in the same way as local ones. Operating small instance is growlingly gatekept as the network grows. For reference my 3-year-old instance of 100-ish users (among which only ~10 are active) now uses 34G data for database.

  3. as for media, you need to store them (at least local uploads) as well. There is a tradeoff in remote content though: if you turn it on you have increasing storage usage and bears the responsibility of data privacy. But if everyone turns it off then we are DDoSing each other because the remote content is fetched whenever it’s viewed.

  4. the fediverse network works perfectly now but that’s when fediverse is still a niche. It’s a ever growing space and more people are joining it. The scalability of fediverse will be soon tested.

  5. it’s exponentially harder to erase data off the fediverse: if you, for whatever reason, need to delete something you posted, good luck with that because any federated instance may have a copy of that data and they don’t necessarily care about your deletion request. The more instances there are, the harder it becomes.

  6. if everyone lives on their own instances the concept of “moderation” will no longer exist: “Moderation” means some selected actors filter contents for the other users, since you are the only user it’s simply a “mute list”

  7. accessibility: let’s face the fact, only a minority of fedi users have the skill, time, resources and will to operate an instance. Even something as 傻瓜式 as a hosted service (such as commercial wordpress hosting) sets many people back because it’s not intuitive for non-techies to understand the basic concepts. Even if you give everyone an managed instance with via a single-click button, those lacking basic knowledge can’t really protect their data and identities from all sorts of pitfalls.

  8. And I may argue that a managed instance is not your own instance. There are still people who have the privilege to see your data 1.

  9. whitelisting is a thing, but that’s not what we really want. “wanna have whitelisted fedi network for a laugh? We had a tool for that since the USENET, it’s called a BBS”

on shared instances:

bigtechs track you and sell your data yes, but why would you trust individuals you never met instead? An instance admin could easily see all your private posts (even DMs); they could reset your password and impersonate you; they can as well sell your data and it’s even harder to sue them because small instances rarely has any legal entities and the are hosted all around the world where different digital laws apply. And this paranoia again leads to single-user instances, which makes other point more relevant.

on mega instances:

it’s out-of-scope for this post to talk about that. I’m only refraining this: mega instances are bad.

okay, now what?

  1. TL;DR, I don’t know. If you know better I do want to hear.

  2. Trust issue is not only with fediverse. Actually it’s a dead end if you dig.

  3. Relays could reduce overheads in a small-instance network. But as a fediverse (pleroma) instance operator I still don’t believe in relays. Maybe my opinion will change in the future but for now moderation is such a pain when the “relayed” servers have different rule sets.

  4. While I do hope for a world every one can be a cyber landlord, such fantasy is as far-fetched as communism.

what about nostr? (hot take alerts)

I was introduced to nostr, a even more progressively decentralized network. In theory you are not represented by an instance, but by your cryptographic keys – this is not a new concept, PGP has been there since…

While I’m intrigued by the protocol that allow you to totally control your online identity, I’m not yet convinced. The simple fact is:

you own your identity, but you don't distribute the contents, the relays do.

The promise is that your content can’t censored, the reality is that the relay operators can decide whether they like you, as well as whether they like other relays. The cencorship (or, moderation) model is not fundamentally different than typical fediverse. And “running your own relays / vendoring your own NIP-05 IDs” matches exactly “running your own fedi instance”

//// TODOs ////

  1. Compatibility with fediverse (as in ActivityPub based social network): so there are bridges. Joining a relay means that your identity is represented by the relay (TODO)
  2. censorship & moderations (TODO)
  3. repeating the point: your pubkey is not for a human to read, which means that
  4. You need to pay to get a NIP-05 address. … Ah … then there comes blockchain companies??

    NIP-05 enables a Nostr user to map their public key to a DNS-based internet identifier.

  5. “but you are not limited to fediverse, you can carry you identity to any service if they support it” – yes, but how is that any different than using OAuth2?

//// TODOs ////

My conclusion on nostr: at least for the time being, nostr is just a hacky implementation of the same fediverse idea.


  1. you may argue that a cloud vendor is the same: they have control on the hardware and they are technically able to dump your data. But data privacy with major cloud providers is a long established thing. I assume those hosted service may be less bounded. But I may be wrong. ↩︎





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