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The Lemmy User Experience is Better When Centralized into Fewer Instances (monero.town)

submitted 1 year ago by Jeknilah@monero.town to c/technology@beehaw.org

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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.

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[–] tet42@ka.tet42.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Spzi@lemmy.click 1 points 1 year ago

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.

How does that increase resilience? I would say the opposite increases resilience, multiple communities for the same topic on different instances. Putting all your eggs in one basket is not resilient, it puts everyone on the whim of the admins of that instance.

[–] Jeknilah@monero.town 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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"?

[–] tet42@ka.tet42.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Jeknilah@monero.town 1 points 1 year ago

I'm often wrong, but I have a hunch that it will be necessary if the goal is to avoid centralization. I do think it would be sensible to limit the broadest communities (politics, tech, gaming) to two central "node" instances; very curious to see if it will get to that point.