We don't want decentralized systems, we want small ones

We don't want distributed systems, we want small systems. It doesn't matter if they are centralized inside: what matters is that they stay at a manageable size. That makes them cheap, easy to maintain and almost free of moderation. One example is tildes, shared Unix servers where every user has their own account. They run on a trusted admin and donations. When they grow too big, more tildes appear. Another example is Friend Camp, a community of friends. It costs about $30 a month, around $1 per person.

Despite being centralized, they feel like the opposite of big platforms. There are no commercial interests and people know each other. It's like a shoe shop in a small town. The shop can only serve a few customers because there is little space, you know the owner's name (maybe even his wife's) and the shelves don't offer much variety; and yet you know you will be well served and the owner wants you to leave with what is best for you. In a big department store, on the other hand, the staff don't care whether you come back or not. The owner might be a board of shareholders who only want to maximize profit. Space is unlimited, but there are queues and it's hard to get help. You don't even know if the product is what you are looking for, even if it is cheaper. Welcome to economies of scale. Now apply that to centralized systems.

Distributed systems make us feel in control, because resources are shared among all participants. In return, they only ask us to provide the hardware and the time to maintain it. And that is where they clash with what Moxie Marlinspike said: "People do not want to run their own servers" (2022). Maybe we don't have the time, the money or the knowledge to be a node in a distributed network. Maybe we already have enough with our lives without also having to keep an eye on our mail server. So we end up using a centralized provider inside a distributed system: GitHub or GitLab when we want to use Git, Gmail or Outlook when we want to use email, or WordPress.com or Medium when we want to publish a blog. The small system solves the dilemma without giving up what matters: one person provides the server and the time for everyone else, and the rest only need to trust someone they know. Isn't that too much load for one person? Not if the community is small. Darius Kazemi, with about 50 active users on Friend Camp, gets on average one moderation request a month.

Take three Mastodon instances as an example: icosahedron.website (about 133 monthly active users), mastodon.technology (about 23,600 accounts) and mastodon.social (about 3.4 million accounts). All three run the same software and the same protocol; the only thing that changes is size. The second one shut down in 2022 because its only admin burned out. The other two are still alive, but for different reasons: the first because it is small, and the third because it has plenty of resources (in 2024, the organization that runs it brought in about 2.19 million euros, almost all of it from donations).

The biggest risk for a volunteer-run community is almost always the same: that whoever maintains it burns out. That is why size is not a detail: it is what keeps the work within what one person can handle. Limiting size with waiting lists, closed registrations or a cap on active users seems counterintuitive, but it works. To grow without burning out, there are only two paths left: raise a lot of money, like mastodon.social, or become a business, like Reddit, X or YouTube. But profit guarantees neither better quality nor better service. My small Forgejo instance is as centralized as GitHub, but it has 10 active users: it has gone down fewer times, it is faster and it costs me pennies a month to run.

Leopold Kohr wrote it in 1957, long before the internet existed: "Wherever something is wrong, something is too big". Maybe we have spent years asking the wrong question. It doesn't matter so much whether a system is centralized, federated or distributed. What matters is whether it fits in the hands of someone you can write to when something breaks. Paul Ford, when he said goodbye to tilde.club, put it in writing: "you can, at any time, for very little money and relatively little effort, stand up a tiny digital community that basically belongs to itself".

So next time you are looking for a place to publish, to host your code or to talk with your friends, don't ask whether it is decentralized. Ask how many people are inside and whether you know the name of the person who runs it.

Sources

Paul Ford on tilde.club, the creator of the first tilde (2014). In his 2019 note he hands the server over to new admins, along with a waiting list of 10,000 people.
I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds, Paul Ford's account (2014) of how tilde.club was born and the flood of accounts in its first days.
Tildeverse, the association of tildes that followed the tilde.club model.
tilde.club, a shared Unix computer funded by its users' donations.
texto-plano.xyz, a Spanish-speaking tilde: "seamos pocos pero unidos" (let us be few but united).
Run your own social, Darius Kazemi's guide based on Friend Camp: 50 to 100 active users, one moderation request a month and about $30 a month in costs.
My first impressions of web3, Moxie Marlinspike's article, the source of the quote "People do not want to run their own servers".
Icosahedron, a Mastodon instance running since February 2017 with closed registrations.
Dear mastodon.technology community, the shutdown announcement by Ash Furrow, who ran it alone.
Archive Team: Mastodon, a record of closed instances, including mastodon.technology and its 23,600 accounts.
mastodon.social, the largest Mastodon instance, run by the developers of the software themselves.
Mastodon Annual Report 2024, the accounts of Mastodon gGmbH: revenue, costs and moderation of mastodon.social.
The Breakdown of Nations, Leopold Kohr's book (1957), the source of the quote "Wherever something is wrong, something is too big".