If everyone was spread out onto different instances, and communities were based all over the fediverse, the decisions of one instance would be less impactful.
Let’s put things in perspective. Lemmy.world currently has a “whopping” 127k users. That’s fewer users than the moderately successful niche subreddit I created on Reddit has, which is just one of several thousand subreddits over 127k in size. Not to mention the tens of thousands of Instagram, youtube, facebook, tiktok, etc., pages with more than 127k subscribers. Saying lemmy.world has “a lot of power” at this point seems like a real stretch to me.
It’s obvious that like mastodon when twitter imploded, not 1% of 1% of 1% of fleeing users actually made it past the registration screen. Maybe Lemmy will get another chance , in 5/10 years
A platform switch takes time, and normally it’s a particular community that takes hold. Right now, on Lemmy, it seems to be mostly memes and shit posting that’s on the front page. Getting more interesting conversations visible to new users will make the biggest difference.
Their “power” would be relative to other lemmy instances, not absolute.
The comparison to reddit isn’t really fair, as by the time they were getting thousands of subs with more than 127k subscribers, they had been bought by Conde Nast, and were also making money through ads.
These servers don’t just magically run for free, someone is paying for it. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want lemmy to change in order to appear more appealing to advertisers.
I do still see value in a general landing page for new lemmy users, but this whole thing has really shown me that it should not be anything like this. .ml and .world have done a lot of work becoming the “big” instances and now they have a taste for censorship (and have most the users) I doubt it will get better.
I don’t know how federation works in detail, but I really hope it’s like torrenting where peers introduce each other. That way if one person decides to defederate with an instance it’s a decision that only applies to him. If anybody else is federated then the connection information is available to all. i.e. the network heals around damage.
I have no problem with someone constructing a bubble for themselves, but they don’t get to say what’s in my bubble.
Yes please! Lemmy.world and lemmy.ml shouldn’t make up the majority of my feed.
I think best case scenario, you have themed instances based around art, tech, politics, news, gaming, food, etc, and the largest communities are hosted there. Then you have “catch all” instances like lemm.ee which federate with everything, there can be as many of these instances as needed as the user base grows. These types of instances should be where the bulk of the new user accounts go, assuming just an average user looking for a /all replacement. Curated instances like beehaw allow for a more fine-tuned experience, but should still function basically as a catch all and not as “hosting the content” instance.
However I understand that building up to that is damn near impossible with the current infrastructure. We would basically need a means to migrate an entire community to a new instance, while simultaneously updating everybody’s subscriptions to reflect the new home of the community.
However I understand that building up to that is damn near impossible with the current infrastructure.
Lemmy is still in its infancy. Any community wanting to move somewhere (like lemdro.id did) can still do it as long as they clearly indicate the new home.
We would basically need a means to migrate an entire community to a new instance, while simultaneously updating everybody’s subscriptions to reflect the new home of the community.
That would be nice. As a regular user, when lemmy.world does something you dislike, like block piracy communities or something, you can simply create a new account and, until something official exists, use LASIM to migrate stuff over. I didn’t think about communities though, if you run the biggest community for some topic what do you do. Create another one, link to it from the first one and hope for the best?
If people would share the idea of the fediverse instead of saying “yeah reddit suck, go to this website instead”, this would put a dent in it.
But since the concept is so alien and hard to describe, people find it easier to just share the site, and since that game keeps being recommended, and since even if they know about multiple sites working together, even those people are going to go to one that has a friendly name, so this is what happens.
I’m only not on it because I like picking less popular things in general, so I actively avoided picking what seemed to be the default at the time.
Also I believe it would help if the sites/instances had a way of distinguishing themselves more and communicating their differences. Even most of the instances’ intro or about pages are mostly saying something like “hey I’m a general use instance, with mostly this language, pick me!”
Which in and of itself is fine, but it seems most of them are general use, so people have no basis for picking one. They may figure out different reasons to like one or the other along the way, but once they pick one initially, I don’t think most people make another account.
I haven’t done much of that either, except for making one my dedicated NSFW account and this one, but I plan on making at least one or two more just in case of downtime, or even to separate genres of content.
The problem is that Lemmy is not federated. You can’t click this link /c/books and get the whole fediverse book community. Federation dies right there.
While this is true, the fact that communities tend to all group together when one gets big enough on an instance means that the same centralized control of power problems happen.
For example one of the Android communities I was subbed to on here closed down because they all moved to one on a different instance that was started by the reddit android mods…so now those same power hungry reddit mods are the mods of the go-to lemmy android community. It’s all centralized there. Are there other android communities on lemmy? Sure, but they’re tiny and unused because no one wants 10 tiny communities, they want 1 big one.
This has its negatives. If someone makes twenty-seven different hate speech communities spread out over twenty-seven instances, it becomes harder to exterminate them like the vermin they are. If they all congregate on one overly-permissive instance, you can defederate them and call it a day. Much easier.
There’s also partial defederation. lemmy.world has just blocked piracy communities while still federated with the rest of the instance, while that decision might not be liked by pirates, we now know this option exists therefore it’s also possible to block hate communities without blocking the entire instance.
Has to be done manually, though. Better tools will make this a more appealing option in the future, but for now I unironically think more centralization is the better option just to make the moderation job a little easier. Lord knows it's difficult enough.
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