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.
Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I’d prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could - hopefully - at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There’s a reason why every community shouldn’t be on a single instance. It’s a single point of failure.
Very frustrating for sure, I feel like I’m constantly playing ping pong with new users.
New user doesn’t understand lemmy and searches for community on service like
lemmy.ml. Community doesn’t exist so the spam the “Create Community” button or spam the admin for it. Admin is overworked/doesn’t know/busy building the site and says “okay”, meanwhile there is already a community of 100+ members on another instance.For me, I built my instance to take some weight off of the main instances, thought “hey here’s a group of communities that are pretty close knit that don’t need to put pressure on the already overloaded servers”, and I still get people who are posting “I made ____ community on lemmy.ml come join!” and it’s like dude, ffs.
For example, I run an instance that focuses on a genre of music. Thus, I’m pretty dang open to anything even remotely open to that.
That turned a bit more ranty than I expected.
Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.
Peoples are lazy. They don’t want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn’t know it exists, its wonky at best.
If a user cant type “Stephen King community” in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn’t exist and give up OR they are going to be hitting that “Create Community” button.
For sure, as much as I want users to be smarter… well my experience in development tells me they never will be. I literally had one user ping me on Lemmy asking how to join, I gave them pictures detailing steps. They were on mobile and gave up because “The subscribe button was in the sidebar and it was too confusing”
That’s what we’re up against. The extra button click was too much for some users.
Lemmy has to get more user friendly when it comes to subscribing. You’re absolutely right it needs to be one search and click “subscribe”. They should bring the feddit browser into lemmy really.
I feel you. When creating an UI you can think of thousands of possibilities which might not be clear to someone and design it in a way that couldn’t possibly be misunderstood, then show it to different people who all agree that it’s clearly structured and logical… and the minute you release it you get posts from users you aks yourself how they could even exist on their own.
yup, which is exactly how the lemmy devs must feel about us, “wtf it’s so simple”, but everyone’s brain works differently. As a dev myself, you really do kind of start to resent your users after a while
That’s not a hot take.
That’s where I think the threadiverse/lemmyverse/fediverse/whatever is (hopefully) going to end up.
The big instances are like browsing /r/all. The focused instances are going to be where it’s at.
“Oh, rust? Yeh, you want the rust instance, or maybe the programming instance. Not here in the gardening instance”
And far easier to moderate. You could have 1,800 communities on the Rust instance and still know content anywhere should be about Rust or Rust-adjacent.
Different paradigms for different tools. I think niche on mastodon and calckey is meh - people need agency. Niche on kbin seems fine because people have agency regardless of server they’re on.
Counterpoint, allowing people to create their own communities is how new ideas for communities come up. If it wasn’t for that freedom, people wouldn’t have come up with ama, meirl and all the other weird concepts that took off
I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to create a new community. I’m saying that due diligence should be taken BEFORE creating a new community, to be sure that community doesn’t already exist.
Mental bandwidth. By adding the requirement of a mod approval before creating a new community will cause most people to not bother at all.
As a counterpoint to that: any new community that gets created on an instance is now a possible liability the site admins have to own.
Makes a lot of sense that you wouldn’t want anyone to make anything on your site, since that’s how you end up with /r/jailbait, and /r/fatpeoplehate and so on.
Seems reasonable you’d want to make sure you understand who is creating what and why on a platform you’re ultimately responsible for.
It’s really not difficult to delete a unwanted community. The cost benefit analysis I think still leans towards open for all, as a breakaway success story makes up for it.
It’s not just the difficulty, it’s that the fediverse runs on reputation.
If you get a reputation for being an instance that has offensive/illegal content, you’ll get defederated and your users will get a materially worse experience than the rest of the instances that are federating with each other - and it really only takes one or two things to get that reputation.
sh.itjust.works is a prime example: it didn’t take an awful lot to get them down the defederation road, and I suspect most admins would want to maintain their reputation and an easy way to do it (until we get like… moderation tools) is to just gatekeep what communities show up on your instance.
Actually that problem is usually registered users going into established communities of otherwise instances and trolling, not new communities pooping up that nobody knows about.
I’d say for the majority of people who are coming here from Reddit, the concept of federated servers and looking for duplicates would be a pain. I think most people who come to a site like kbin search to see if there’s a local community and if not would want to create it.
Admins I’d assume would be able to search connected other sites to see if a community exists elsewhere, but that sounds like it puts more work on them when they’re busy with PRs and infrastructure work.
I’ve got no idea about what the best approach is, but it needs to be somewhat simple it we want people to join and stick around I feel.
although having the same community in different servers might serve a purpose as well, I try to subscribe to the “same” community in different servers, this way you don’t have centralization since if one goes down, the others are still up, and you can post to whatever server and interested people will see the post (assuming everyone does the same).
I would rather a lemmy instance only supported a single community. That would force the horizontal scaling better
That would be extremely wasteful in a resource sense. You would need more overhead, more domains, more everything to support that.
Then maybe 10-20 communities?
Yeah, I do like throwing hot takes out there. XD But I do think that you are asking a lot when you ask people to limit the scope of their instance.
It will always be easier to just add another community under a larger instance than to go out and self-host your own niche from scratch. There’s certainly a temptation for an instance to go mega and general-purpose.
I’m not disagreeing that a single instance is a point of failure- just that people are willing to make that trade-off.
I was never insinuating that an instance owner should limit their scope. But just because you run an instance doesn’t mean you have to be the home node for all the communities you are interested in. It goes against the idea of federation. If a community already exists on another instance, as an instance owner you should subscribe to that community rather than making your own. That increases resilience.
Interesting. Do you think there will be steps to make communities more focused? Like a hypothetical deal where lemmyworld will give up “gaming” if kbin gives up “technology”?
Honestly, I hope not.
For example, if all the “programming” communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn’t take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.
There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps. And ideally, I think that’s what should happen.
This is why Squabbles and Tildes will probably do well in the end. They are much more strict on allowing people in at the start, MUCH easier entry and just simpler to understand overall.
But any site which restricts sign ups is going to turn off 50% of the people who show up.