Why are my feeds improving so quickly? I'm seeing #exponentialGrowth in the value of #Mastodon that is following Reed's Law as #twittermigration arrivals self-organize.
In 2001 David Reed said a network's value is driven by groups. The number of potential groups grows exponentially (2^N) as the network population increases. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%27s_law
Look for this network effect to overcome the friction of moving from the birdsite to the #Fediverse as community formation accelerates.
@mpm IMHO, Reed's law overstates the value of group forming networks because not all group sizes are viable. Groups with less than 5 noisy people fade away. Since typically 90% lurk[1], the mean minimum viable group size is somewhere around 25-50. Groups of bigger than Dunbar's number have a tendency to split. So in practice the maximum viable group size is somewhere between 100 and 500. So the value in a group forming network of size N is > 2*N and < 2^N.
[1] 1% post, 9% comment, 90% lurk
@jbond I'm not convinced that groups have to be long-lived to add value - I don't think I could put a lower bound on how long a group has to exist to be useful. As my interest change, the groups I want to participate in change, and the potential for what may be limited duration group conversations (like this one) is why I like Reed's Law.
@ParkinJim @mpm And thinking about why and how groups form is useful in network design. Whether that group forming is explicitly supported or implicitly emergent.
@ParkinJim @mpm Not really disagreeing except with the maths. Reed's theoretical 2^N-N-1 is the number of all possible groups of size 2 to N. But both the lower and upper bound are unlikely. The lower bound because a group of size 2 is not really a group. And a group of every person on the network and group of size approaching that are very unlikely. While the idea of group forming having more value than just connections is good, the actual value is lower than the theoretical max.