Most people access the Fediverse through one of the large instances: lemmy.world, kbin, or beehaw. New or small instances of Lemmy have no content by default, and can most easily get content by linking to larger Lemmy instances. This is done manually one “Community” at a time (I spent 15 minutes doing this yesterday). Meanwhile, on larger instances, content naturally aggregates as a result of the sheer number of users. Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it’s inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances. It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.
I actually think the Fediverse is in the beginning the process of fragmenting into siloed smaller, centralized instances. Beehaw, which is on the list of top instances, just blacklisted everyone from lemmy.world. Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other. It is possible that this fragmentation and instability? of Lemmy instances will kill the viability of Federated Reddit altogether, but hopefully not.
These are my main takeaways from my three days on the Fediverse. I will stick around to see if the Fediverse can sustain itself after the end of the Reddit blackouts.
Hard disagree. Centralization is what enables rich dickheads to seize control of what ought to be the commons. Dispersing the community into many small nodes that communicate with each other is the safeguard against that happening. Ideally it shouldn’t matter which node you call home.
OP is not saying centralization is good, just that it appears to be inevitable even on the fediverse. They suggested this centralization could kill the project altogether. You misread their point.
Smh people downvoting OP because they can’t read.
Also, the title of the post is “the lemmy experience is better when centralized” so maybe if you’re gonna call out reading comprehension, try a little of it yourself. Smh indeed.
Well maybe if you read past the title you would be following the conversation better
So the title and the content of the post are inconsistent, and you’re gonna put that on me? Cool cool cool.
This is exactly what happened with the early waves of mastodon migration; a whole load of instances suddenly had to up their game, there was defederation all over, and tooling had to improve to handle mod needs in larger communities. We’ll get there, it’ll stabilise. In the meantime, fund your server and thank your mods :)
Gross blech gross yuck. No, please god no. I’m subscribed to communities from loads of instances. The whole point of federated applications is that no one really has control over the whole.
People who have been engaged in an authoritarian system for so long that they “can’t see the forest for the trees” are lost when they experience anything else. They are driven to recreate the centralized authority, because it is life as they know it.
Totally disagree, the more tech savvy can spin up their own single user instances if they want, be fully in control of their own content and participate just like anyone on any large instance bar being defederated. All for basically free
Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit
Beehaw has been it’s own thing for a couple years now. It has never wanted to be Reddit. They have done such a good job of curating their instance with excellent communities and membership that the Rexxitors want to join it and make it into THEIR replacement for Reddit.
I agree that some kind of centralization is important to a good UX, at least for an entry point – centralization reduces cognitive load as someone is trying a new service out. But I disagree that this centralization needs to be at the server level.
Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it’s inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances.
Why wouldn’t a centralized, curated set of communities that span multiple servers work? This is basically the Lemmy Community Browser, although I think it could go one step farther to just have a button to subscribe to all of the top 50 communities. (tbc, I think people should curate their communities as humans, but having a little push to start is helpful.)
Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other.
Why do you think this? My understanding is that Beehaw’s defederalization was communicated to be a temporary workaround for a lack of moderation tools needed to deal with spam from large open-registration servers – not competition. (I’m taking that post in good faith, which could be wrong.) Any other signs of competition?
This kind of stuff follows Zipf’s Law so it’s 100% expected that there will be 3-4 instances aggregating the largest amounts of traffic, but instances smaller than that will constantly shift around and grow, organically, rather than be compounded and corralled artificially by one platform. In other words, this is just statistics playing out and we’re nowhere near the end.
“Zipfian distribution”… I learned something new today. Cool concept, thanks for sharing!
This isn’t “one or the other” IMO. There’s room for niche instances hyper-focused on a generalized topic like “math,” “comp sci,” “sports,” etc.
But then there should also be a massive generalized instance (hopefully 2 at least so the competition keeps admins in check) that has a little bit of everything and acts as a Reddit replacement. We can have our cake and eat it too.
There’s already an entire Star Trek instance, startrek.website. Niche instances may end up being a way some communities get around the issue of big servers defederating from each other over their different administration policies. With that topic having its own instance, Trek fans on Beehaw and Lemmy.world can unite in nerdy fandom across the divide. I’m not quite sure how the defederation works through a third party instance though, if posts/comments from Lemmy.world users to startrek.website will still show up when viewed through beehaw’s display of the communities there or if they will be filtered out of the feed locally.
I’m scrolling through old posts and figured I’d give an answer to this in case someone else comes across it and is wondering. Regardless of if the instance is a third party instance that’s federated with two instances that are defederated (ex: beehaw and lemmy.world), neither can see the other user’s posts or comments regardless of where they are.
I was scrolling through [email protected] earlier and there is a popular post that I can see from another account, but I can not see it on my beehaw account, because the poster is a lemmy.world user.
I think the issue that beehaw had was one of insufficient moderation tooling. Very solvable, and the admins even say that, but they also said they can’t stand around waiting for mod tools to become available, so they’re using the tool they have for the time being. If Lemmy catches on, I’m sure these issues will be solved in due time.
Beehaw is big on the “safe space” approach, rather than “grow” approach. So makes sense they did what they did.
In their defense, I remember a lot of people bouncing off voat specifically because it was full of trolls, racists, and generally horrible people. We don’t want that happening here, too.
Its a fine line between “safe space” and “too space so no content”. I think Beehaw has managed to achieve that
