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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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[–] BurningnnTree@lemmy.one 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If big instances are already defederating from each other then I don't see how Lemmy can grow like many of us want it to. I mean, now any new user who randomly chooses Lemmy.World as their server is going to get a much worse Lemmy experience and they won't even be aware of it. (Come to think of it, maybe I'm getting a lesser experience right now because maybe my server defederated from another big server that I'm not aware of.) This seems like a flawed system, or at least it seems like a system that isn't intended to have much user growth.

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can view exactly who your instance federates with. If the instance is public, the instances that are blocked/allowed are publicly visible. New users probably won't know what this means... but certainly could after some time/understanding. No reason you shouldn't know! So let's fix that.

https://lemmy.one/instances

Your instance chose to block the following instances:

lemmygrad.ml
asbestos.cafe
eientei.org

[–] Taxxor@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But that only helps in knowing which communities I can see, I still don't know how much I'm missing out in the comments on other communities because some of them might be from people my instance has defederated.

I noticed this today when I had a comment chain on lemmy.world that I accessed with my lemm.ee instance. That chain was >10 posts long with several different users from different instances.
When I looked into that community with my feddit.de account, I could only see the first two comments of that chain, not even my own lemm.ee comments were visible despite not being blocked by feddit.de.
It was because the third post of that chain was made by a user on an instance that is blocked by feddit.de and that lead to all following posts also missing.
So now I’m feeling like I’m possibly missing big parts of all those comment sections just because they happen to include a comment from a user somewhere early in the chain that is on an instance which is blocked by my instance.

That's the reason despite me being german I probalby won't use feddit.de anymore because, at least for the time being, lemm.ee doesn't have anyone blocked so in this specific example I can at least see everything posted on lemmy.world that isn't already blocked by lemmy.world itself(in which case I don't miss out because noone could see these posts). While with feddit.de, browsing on lemmy.world I won't see things blocked by lemmy.world aswell as things blocked by feddit.de

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think this is necessarily a defederation issue. I'm running a private instance and should not really have been defederated as nothing comes from my instance except 2 users (of which I'm the more vocal of the 2 of us). I run into the problem you outline all the same. My version will show 2 comments, the origin server will show 11. Sometimes even completely different comments and none of the instances show to be blocking me on their /instance page.

I'm not on either feddit.de, lemm.ee, or lemmy.world's lists. I still run into this.

What I think is going on is simply hiccups in federation. Instances where one of the instances misses sending an ActivityPub message to all parties and that's it.

But let's even say that I am currently defederated. From my understanding this is a temporary measure until stuff settles down a bit.

[–] Taxxor@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

Well in my case it's perfectly clear that the problem was defederation because the comments I was able to see with my feddit instance were all there precisely up to the point where a person from lemmy.fmhy.ml, an instance that is blocked on feddit, posted something and everything that was in context of that post was gone when viewed from feddit.

[–] TechieJamie@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

~~Maybe it should be a common practice to list larger servers that you've chosen to defederate from? Beehaw is being forthcoming about it, so at least people know what they're missing out on. And I don't think they'd have a bunch more hidden away from us. Now, if a community does this and tells no-one, that could be a genuine problem.~~ Making an account on another instance is a little annoying, but it's not that bad if you're old and accustomed to classical forums.

Edit: I didn't even notice the /instances URL on Lemmy. GG, it's already openly out there.

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All servers running lemmy are open about it... Check the very bottom of your instance page and click "Instances". In their case it's

https://lemmy.one/instances

And for you it's

https://beehaw.org/instances

[–] TechieJamie@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't notice the instances link down there. I've edited my comment.

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 3 points 1 year ago

No problem! Lots of exploring to do... it's a whole new world for a huge amount of us.