EDIT: Thank you all for your answers, now I’m reassured this platform is in good hands and we will always have the freedom to switch. Let’s make this place vibrant, diverse and decentralized, like the old web used to be.
I feel like this instance is getting too big and all the content is being centralized here. Am I right or there are other instances thriving too?
Wherever I go I keep seeing lots of lemmy.world users and communities and kind of feel worried about centralization.
programming.dev is thriving but we are also a niche, lots of good communities for developers.
I think it’s ok, as long as federation still works and migration is sorted out. The problem with centralisation is the control that can give. If there’s a mechanism to move a community or user to a new instance without too much disruption, then the users maintain control and have recourse if the operators do something unpopular.
Mastodon has a pretty good system that automatically moves people’s follows to your new account if you move. We need something like that for Lemmy.
A little bit early to be worried about this. This server is very new.
There are many other instances. Feel free to join them :)
I’ve posted about this before and I think a lot of people disagree, but some centralization is good. There has to be a no-thought option for when people want to join Lemmy. After they learn more about federation, they can move on to another instance.
The reason why kbin grew so fast is because for a lot of people, Kbin = kbin.social (See how “kbin” links to kbin.social on: list of alternatives on Reddit)
I believe this also explains Beehaw’s growth despite their onerous rules. When someone recommends Beehaw, they don’t need to think about which instance of Beehaw they want to join, they just go to Beehaw.
A lot of people are dogmatic about federation, but I quite frankly think that if you are going to die on the hill, don’t complain when you die.
After they learn more about federation, they can move on to another instance.
Right…but, what if they’ve created a community (or communities) here on lemmy.world and decide they’d prefer to move on. The communities aren’t portable. And I’m not sure how identically named communities co-exist across instances. They clearly could be separate, but co-mingling by identical names…would it cause problems? And by that I mean it would, I just don’t know how it gets solved. Also, if I start a community and then abandon that instance, does the community automatically die unless there are other mods?
I think community portability will need to be built into the platform. Without that, we are one bad server owner from losing entire communities. It will inevitably happen at done point.
I don’t think anyone can tell where we’re going. Mastodon.social was the largest instance by far for some time, then at the deluge, it splintered.
Part of the reason for Mastodon to fracture is specialization - each instance does something unique. Maybe Lemmy will do the same, maybe not.
But if we end up with 3 primary instances, it’s still decentralized - I think the most useful feature of Lemmy isn’t that we’re spread out, it’s that we could be.
I think this highlights a very good point. It’s totally ok for everything to gravitate to a central instance as long as that instance is run in a way that everyone is happy with. The key is the the moment something changes and users aren’t happy, the decentralised nature of Lemmy gives those users an exit strategy - a way to replace the bad instance and carry on.
If a single Lemmy instance becomes the new Reddit and then pulls a move that angers the community the way Reddit has recently, users wouldn’t be reduced to protests and hoping that management listen, they could just spin up new instances, mirror the content, and carry on like nothing happened.
The big, bad instance could just disable federation and all communities and user accounts would be locked on that instance.
There’s a ton of other messengers and there’s WhatsApp but as long as my family doesn’t move from WhatsApp I’m stuck with it.
I think we’ll see a bunch of the top communities gravitate towards a few instances, but the userbase will spread out over time. Right now people are going to the biggest, b/c they just want to get on and try it out. But over time as people learn how to work with this new system they’ll venture out to others. I could see a lot of people eventually hosting their own instance just for their one user, but have no communities of its own.
But for communities, finding an instance that has the right rules and plugins available will lead them to looking for trusted servers to moderate them from. As long as what Beehaw’s doing doesn’t become a trend, it should be fine
The Beehaw thing pissed me off because it was a systemic version of the post I’ve been so fuckin tired of - “Why isn’t this Reddit and when will it become Reddit?”
Really wish the people who want a 1 for 1 walled garden Reddit clone would just Go to one of the 1 for 1 walled garden Reddit clones instead of users demanding devs make it Reddit and server owners defederating from everyone in an attempt to be the winning walled off lemmy server instead of using it as intended.
You’re not wrong. There needs to be slightly better/more informative marketing that your communities are accessible from anywhere, and locale of the server doesn’t matter.
People are joining lemmy.world before they learn/understand they can access communities from any federated node (which is nearly everything except beehaw)
Federation seems to have its issues though, unfortunately. I created a post on lemmy.world earlier today (in hardware@lemmy.ml), and it took about 15 minutes for it to show up on lemmy.ml and sopuli.xyz.
If we consider something that is breaking news, 15 minutes is WAY too slow; there will be tons of duplicates posted from dozens of instances, even if they are posting to the exact same community.
That’s most likely happening because of the over-centralization. If your origin server had been smaller federation to/from it and !hardware@lemmy.ml would have been significantly faster. Having a no-nonsense “urgent news” lemmy instance act as a hub for faster federation would be a great value-add for the community as a whole.
I think that is true. Could be because instances like Lemmy.ml don’t let new users create an account, beehaw unfederated other instances and kbin also has some problems with federation… So, only Lemmy.world can really thrive I guess. Other instances I have not seen that much. Maybe sh.itjust.works (or something like that) are thriving but I don’t know.
I’ve been using Kbin and from what I know they only have a single instance of Lemmy unfederated, and I’ve found a few magazines I really like so far, but most content I’ve seen has been from Lemmy
You can check stats on instances here.
lemmy.world is #2 by total user count (lemmy.ml being the 1st), but #1 by active users.
And judging by the Local posts and Local comments count, it seems that .world users interact more with communities in other instances than the local ones, unlike the other top instances.
So I would dare to say that your concern over content being monopolized by .world (based on subscribers to local communities) isn’t founded - high number of users, but they tend to subscribe and interact more with communities on other instances.
This is of course anecdotal (same as your example), but I tend to see the opposite in my feed - few posts from communities on .world. It’s very subjective based on what you subscribed to.
The high number of users on .world is because it still has open registration (server was recently upgraded beyond current capacity).
The high number of users on .world is because it still has open registration
I wonder if accounts on certain servers will be “prestigious” one day lol
Where’s kbin on that list?
we’re not a lemmy instance so we wouldn’t be on there at all.
I think people(people includes me, I think the majority of users are new to this stuff) still don’t get that unless a certain instance de-federalizes others en masse, you’re still gonna be able to access it’s content and contribute from your instance.
Although, in general,I wouldn’t be worried. Even if a certain instance is getting big, you are still not subject to the whims of some venture capitalist corp in silicon valley.
still don’t get that unless a certain instance de-federalizes others en masse, you’re still gonna be able to access it’s content and contribute from your instance. Sadly it just happened with beehaw.org, one large instance defederating another. That’s a pretty big wall.
Although, in general,I wouldn’t be worried. Even if a certain instance is getting big, you are still not subject to the whims of some venture capitalist corp in silicon valley. Sadly corporations love to control everything and always end up giving small startups offers that are too good to refuse and they either take it over or shelf it forever. I really don’t want corporate control to return to the web. Reddit swallowed all the forums due to how convenient it was.
I’m aware of beehaw defederating. However, you gotta see how it happened. They were completely transparent about why they did it, and that it’s not permanent. Once moderation tools start to get added, we’ll probably see re-federation.
