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Jeknilah Jun 15, 2023

The Lemmy User Experience is Better When Centralized into Fewer Instances

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Jeknilah

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"?