Mastodawn

The Lemmy User Experience is Better When Centralized into Fewer Instances

https://monero.town/post/9599

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

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.

admin Jun 15, 2023

I think instances need to be more focused. For example monero.town, very focused on Monero. If people are interested in other technology, sub to an instance focused on that, etc. I don't see how mega instances that try to replace reddit are viable in the long term, especially if they start to defederate.

small44 Jun 15, 2023

So if I'm interested in many topics I have to create an account on every singles instance?

tet42 Jun 15, 2023

That's not how Lemmy works. You just need an account on ONE instance. And then subscribe to all the communities that interest you, some may be local to your instance and some may be hosted on other instances.

small44 Jun 15, 2023

Why would I join an instance about music for example to end up subscribing to communities that have nothing to do with music?

tet42 Jun 16, 2023

Of the themed instances that exist now, I'd be willing to bet that in addition to their local communities they host that they also subscribe to other communities that aren't strictly related to whatever theme they are going with.

For example, I'm sure the Star Trek instance also subscribes to the [email protected] community so the admin can stay abreast of Lemmy news. And probably also follows other technology related communities as well.

I think most people would just want to gravitate to whatever they want to be identified with. There's nothing stopping you from joining a music themed instance and then adding some non-music subscriptions to your list. It doesn't force those subs on anyone else on the instance.

And if you don't want to be identified with any specific topic or community, you can always join Beehaw or Lemmy.world and subscribe to whatever you like piecemeal.

Spzi Jun 16, 2023

Why would I join an instance about music

Maybe the user feels music is an important part of their identity and likes the idea to call a music instance their home. Or any other reason, doesn't have to have any reason, especially not a reason which is compelling to others.

to end up subscribing to communities that have nothing to do with music?

Maybe the same user still has other interests besides music and likes to follow those.

Or in summary: Why not? It's possible.

For different people, different criteria will influence their choice of home instance. Some may even choose to have several home instances. Other factors might be uptime, latency, defederation status, size, local communities, rules, ...

For most people, it does not matter much what their home instance is, which is just another possible explanation for registering on a music instance and subscribing to remote, non-music communities. Like how you can register to Microsoft services with a Gmail address.

BoCanCan Jun 16, 2023

The problem with that is users need to make a separate account for each instance. Imagine if you had to re-login every time you wanted to view a different subreddit. It’s a major pain.

That problem could be mitigated if you had an app that could seamlessly log in to multiple instances and display the content in one place. Credentials would be stored locally on your phone for security. Do you know if that exists, or if anyone’s working on something similar?

vektor Jun 16, 2023

From what I understand, and someone correct me if I’m wrong, you don’t need multiple accounts (unless one instance has blacklisted another). You can subscribe to a community on a different instance and be able to comment and post without creating an account on the second instance.

For example, on kbin’s search page you can search for [email protected] and subscribe. programming.dev is a completely separate instance running Lemmy with its own communities. Then you can see content from there on your subscribed page.

cnnrduncan Jun 16, 2023

That's actually not true if the instances are federated with each other. I post/subscribe to a few lemmy.nz communities despite having a beehaw account!

barsoap Jun 16, 2023

If being focused on one thing is for you then by all means, go for it. I very much doubt that that's the case for everyone, though, not everyone is comfortable saying "metal is my whole (online) life", "crypto is my whole life", "plush toys are my whole life", and if that isn't the case, well, do you join the plush toys or death metal instance?

It's not like the universe put an upper cap on the number of communities. Instances themselves can be little villages in which everyone knows each other on a human, instead of interest, or they can be big cities in which you're considered crazy if you greet someone on the street. Or all they do is focus on wet shaving and gladly engage with anyone else who is in need of advise or information, but not nearly as nerdy about it than them.

There's place for all of that in the fediverse.

collegefurtrader Jun 15, 2023

I mean, my first instinct was “how can I monetize this”

dav Jun 15, 2023

is that you Spez?

manitcor Jun 15, 2023

this is the way its supposed to work, reddit is a bunch of fragmented communities too, the only thing you share is a domain.

UselesslyBrisk Jun 15, 2023

And a single place to find communities.

bdonvr Jun 15, 2023

What, don't you use browse.feddit.de?

UselesslyBrisk Jun 16, 2023

Browser.feddit doesnt include kbin right?

macniel Jun 15, 2023

Beehive blacklisted Lemmy.world? Mhm and that's why we need decentralised instances. I don't care about how beehive views Lemmy world as I can access still both as I am from an entirely different instance :)

huntr Jun 15, 2023

There's still one issue that bothers me about Beehaw blacklisting lemmy.world though.

For example, if someone from lemmy.world posts to c/[email protected], then only other people on lemmy.world will see that post because Beehaw will not sync it for any other instances to see.

abclop99 Jun 16, 2023

But that's caused by the centralization of users and communities the few big instances that allow anyone to create communities. If communities were more spread out between smaller, more specialized instances, an issue with any one instance wouldn't affect communities on other instances.

sanjosanjo Jun 16, 2023

Is it difficult to find a small instance that has access to the larger instances? Are you able to post to both Beehaw and lemmy.world from the server you mention?

I'm thinking about self-hosting an instance, but I'm not clear if these bigger instances would block me because I'm some little unknown server. Would they have to manually give me access to interact (federate?) with them if I self-host?

macniel Jun 16, 2023

I am from feddit.de and have subscribed to communities on my home instance, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, pathfinder.social and beehive and can post and comment there to my heart's content.

I don't know how private/self hosted instances work

Spzi Jun 16, 2023

I don’t care about how beehive views Lemmy world as I can access still both as I am from an entirely different instance :)

It impacts you still if you subscribe to beehaw.org communities. Their defederation means lots of other users cannot participate in these communities anymore. So there is less activity for you, even if you belong to neither the defederating nor the defederated instance.

macniel Jun 16, 2023

Okay yeah, that's a facet I haven't looked at.

mim Jun 15, 2023

And this is why I didn't sign up for a large instance.

I'd rather joine a smaller one that doesn't block any instance, neither is it blocked by other instances.

I just want to slowly find new communites and join the ones I think have good discussion, regardless of where they are hosted. I don't need babysitting.

Powderhorn Jun 15, 2023

Spinning up your own solves all these issues. That's not for everyone, myself included thus far, but ultimately, no one is going to build, maintain and host exactly what I want for free forever. That's an unreasonable expectation in any context.

mim Jun 16, 2023

That's true.

I'm not that invested into Lemmy yet. But if I end up using it as much as reddit, I might do this (sounds like an interesting project anyway).

For now, I'll keep my account in a smaller / more open instance.

If anything, I think reddit was a good lesson on what happens when you let a small group of people control such a large platform. We might run into the same issues if we get a couple of instances get too large.

Powderhorn Jun 16, 2023

The first sentence of your last graf makes "might" do some really heavy lifting in the second.

I think we'll see a full spectrum of how people use Lemmy, and I suspect in the long run, self-selection on each instance is going to make federation make a far more understandable concept to people with any curiosity about it, and if everyone else wants Reddit, hey, more power to them.

mim Jun 16, 2023

You already see a lot of people congregating in the top Mastodon instances.

People might not understand that they can still communicate with the larger instances (or they might feel like it's a "safer bet" to join the larger ones). Anyway, by the time they understand, they are not gonna create a new account in another instance.

Powderhorn Jun 16, 2023

I have so far found that explaining it as being like email (defederation aside) is not helpful.

mim Jun 16, 2023

Really? I've actually found the opposite.

Email is probably the only federated protocol most people still use. So they can get their heads around that.

Powderhorn Jun 16, 2023

Email does one thing and is exceedingly good at it. There are no other examples in the modern web I can think of for which there has been zero feature creep. And it is presented to the user as an application of a protocol, not the protocol itself.

That said, the past week has been made it abundantly clear that I have zero knowledge of how most people use internet connections.

anji Jun 15, 2023

Beehaw only defederated from Lemmy.world because of the currently limited moderation tools in the software. This is not going to be a problem forever.

I hope people can find communities both on large instances (Beehaw, Lemmy.world) as well on as very small niche instances. Discoverability is a bit a problem but I think over time we will find communities we like, and participate in them. What instance they are hosted on is not all that important.

MadCybertist Jun 16, 2023

I'm on kbin and I have to say I like what they are doing better than Lemmy as far as ease of use and UI. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

tox_solid Jun 16, 2023

I agree. I have both lemmy and kbin accounts, and so far I think the new user experience on kbin is just a little bit easier. But I'll keep my eye on lemmy in the meantime. You're right, it will be very interesting to see how this thing develops.

ethane Jun 16, 2023

The best chance of succeeding is federation across both. The user base on both is already small, there's no need for this us-vs-them mentality.

towerful Jun 15, 2023

It sounds like you are describing new user experience.
And I understand, coming from Reddit, how this can be a shock.
However, that's how Lemmy works.
Similar to how twitter users got a shock moving (or trying to move) to mastadon.

The very nature of the fediverse works better with more instances, where a single instance has fewer users and the communities are more focussed.

Beehaw hasn't "blacklisted everyone from...". They've defederated. Whilst it may seem similar, it's more nuanced. And that's what a lot of people don't understand.
Block-listing all users from lemmy.world from interacting with beehaw would be an amazing ability. That would put beehaw in a read-only state for users on lemmy.world, whilst still allowing beehaw users access to lemmy.world.
Unfortunately, the current admin/mod tools do not allow for that. And manually dealing with the huge influx of toxic users (posting death threats, illegal porn or trolling) was taking too much time.

Besides, the lemmy.world admin is working on custom tooling to deal with this issue. Because it is their users causing this issue, and it is their problem. And there is no higher authority - there are no Reddit admins to say "stop brigading".
Shitjustworks, last I heard, weren't responding to communication.
I have no doubts that beehaw will refederate as soon as Lemmy.world sorts their mod issues, or the Lemmy framework allows for more nuanced mod tools.

You have to remember that Lemmy is young.
It's been around for a few years, but the shear scale of what is happening now is less than 2 weeks old

JohannesOliver Jun 15, 2023

It’s unfortunate if the sh.itjust.works folks aren’t speaking, their listed rules seem pretty reasonable and the problem users appear to be breaking the rules of that instance too.

Lionir [he/him]Jun 16, 2023

We have talked with them and will work with other instances to push for better moderation tool. We have nothing against individual people or their communities. Let's keep that in mind.

FaceDeer Jun 16, 2023

This copy-and-pasted reply doesn't actually address what I was talking about.

The people who have a problem here aren't lemmy.world, it's beehaw. So while it's understandably polite for lemmy.world to moderate themselves, ultimately the tools you're going to need will be on beehaw's side, because even if lemmy.world does everything you could possibly desire there's going to be many other instances that allow open subscription in the future and you can't expect them all to do your policing for you.

Lionir [he/him]Jun 16, 2023

This message was not copy-pasted nor was it addressed to you, I'm kinda confused why you think that.

But yes, beehaw needs moderations tools - we are working with other instances so that Lemmy - for everyone - can have better tools.

Also, we don't expect other instances to do policing for us, this is why we want better federation options so that people using Beehaw can interact with the outside but those that do not cultivate a culture that matches with what we want would not be able to interact on Beehaw.

FaceDeer Jun 16, 2023

Very weird, there appears to be a bug in kbin. I'm seeing your "We have talked with them..." comment as a response to dozens of different comments here, including one that I made, and now when I look through the thread my response to your comment is replicated in all those dozens of places as well. My apologies, that would explain why your response seemed like such a non-sequitur to me. I'll see if I can file a bug report about this.

Edit: here's the bug report.

Edit 2: I missed a duplicate bug report that was already filed for this issue

A response was duplicated multiple times and added to multiple different unrelated comments

In [this thread](https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/30507/The-Lemmy-User-Experience-is-Better-When-Centralized-into-Fewer#entry-comment-147654) [this comment](https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/30507/The-Lemmy-User-Experience-is-Better-When-Centralized-into-Fewer#entry-comment-135164) got duplicated five times and attached to several different comments as a response. One was mine, and when I responded to it my response (and the subsequent response to my response) also wound up duplicated. I tried using "copy URL" to get direct links to all five of these comments but the URL it gave is identical for all five of them. I've attached a screenshot showing some of the duplication

Codeberg.org

Lionir [he/him]Jun 16, 2023

Thank you for filing the bug report - that is really weird... I hope kbin fixes that issue quickly because that's definitely gonna lead to some very off interpretations.

Jeknilah Jun 16, 2023

You misunderstand. I was making the case that for me personally, the fediverse works better if there are few central node instances that are not particularly focused. I get that this is controversial, but I make the case for it anyways.

For example, I would rather have all the largest technology, gaming, and selfhosting communities be in one or two instances rather than having to x-post to 5 technology or gaming communities across numerous instances.

The second part is only speculation, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyways.

M. Orange Jun 16, 2023

I mean... that's on you, then. Historically, that's not how the Fediverse has worked, and it likely will continue to not work that way. Things could always change, considering the Twitter exodus and now the Reddit exodus, but the way most Fediverse services are set up seems to encourage smaller communities rather than large, centralized ones. Plus, if you have centralized ones, what happens if admins go rogue? What if the servers go down? What if, what if, what if? With decentralization, you avoid so many issues that come with having those large, centralized instances. Of course, there are downsides, but if you want something centralized, maybe try something like Tildes?

Jeknilah Jun 16, 2023

Twitter is a extremely good fit for ActivityPub as there you are following users, while in Lemmy you primarily follow communities whose strength is determined by number. !technology on beehaw is better than !technology on an instance of 10 people.

By centralized, I mean to be in the 1-4 large instances on Lemmy that people flock to from smaller instances. Right now, the design of the Fediverse encourages former Redditors to join the biggest instances. Discovery tools might spread out the users and make solo instances more viable, but the activity may still be concentrated in the same few instances.

Every instance has the potential to be standalone like Tildes by defederating from everybody else once they hit critical mass. Like Truth Social on Mastodon. Or Kbin before it Federated.

czech Jun 16, 2023

I think we just need better discovery and aggregation. If everyone is looking at an aggregation of "/technology" from every federated instance then there's no reason to flock to large instances.

FaceDeer Jun 16, 2023

Block-listing all users from lemmy.world from interacting with beehaw would be an amazing ability. That would put beehaw in a read-only state for users on lemmy.world, whilst still allowing beehaw users access to lemmy.world. Unfortunately, the current admin/mod tools do not allow for that.

...

Besides, the lemmy.world admin is working on custom tooling to deal with this issue. Because it is their users causing this issue, and it is their problem.

It seems to me that calling this "lemmy.world's problem" and expecting them to be the ones to solve it is disingenuous. You yourself say that you could "solve" it with your own custom tooling. Why not work on adding the ability to block users from a specific other instance on your instance, if that would be an amazing ability? Why is it only lemmy.world that has to do work to solve the problem?

Other instances also allow open signups, and there will no doubt be more of them in the future.

Taubin Jun 16, 2023

I'm very out of the loop here, what's going on with beehaw and lemmy.world?

I'll be honest, the federation thing is very confusing for new users. I have set up my own instance and have pulled a few instances into it (I think that's the correct terminology), but I still don't quite understand it all.

One thing I do find frustrating, is most of the content that shows up is from 1 instance (beehaw) and 1 community in that instance (Technology).

I found a few things I'm interested in and added communities to my instance, but all that seems to show up is the one instance and one community. It kind of seems to defeat the purpose. I should have just joined beehaw and stuck with whatever communities they have. Which again, seems to defeat the whole point.

I'm technical enough to set up my own instance on my own server (with a few other federated items on it) but this in particular has proven frustrating. I'm sure someone will come along and tell me I'm doing it wrong, but that's the point. It shouldn't be this frustrating or confusing if it wants to succeed.

In fact, I had to log into Beehaw to comment here, as attempting to comment from my instance, just times out.

abclop99 Jun 16, 2023

https://beehaw.org/post/567170

Taubin Jun 16, 2023

Thank you for that

tet42 Jun 15, 2023

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.

towerful Jun 15, 2023

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"

supernovae Jun 16, 2023

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.

db0 Jun 15, 2023

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

tet42 Jun 15, 2023

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.

AnonymousLlama Jun 16, 2023

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.

Jeknilah Jun 15, 2023

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.

tet42 Jun 15, 2023

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 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.

Jeknilah Jun 15, 2023

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"?

Spzi Jun 16, 2023

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.