Can confirm

My personal predictions:

Reddit will continue to exist, but become an increasingly zombified dumping ground for screenshots from other platforms, videos of people being injured/humiliated in public, and lowest-common-denominator “discussion” of culture war topics. It may also to continue supporting small niche communities like r/HVACadvice where you can get a quick answer about something specific from a domain expert, but will largely just become a firehose of diarrhea.

Large Lemmy instances like lemmy.world will pick up the slack for the mostly good-natured people turned off by the advertising and shitshow at reddit and other corpo social medias. It’ll be better than current reddit, but increasingly enlightenened centrist, and importing braindead redditisms (shit like “and my axe” etc.)

Smaller Lemmy instances that care more about the kindness and quality of discussion will pour more grassroots efforts into strict moderation, and defederating from mainstream instances. They will tradeoff a wider userbase for a more kind and nurturing atmosphere.

Why do you want to just fuck shit up, when you don’t even understand how it works?

They clearly don’t think that, since right after they said:

Of course, due to substantial inequality between instance size, we expect to see a power distribution, with a spike on the left that quickly falls and tapers out. Power laws govern much of the real world; many phenomena behave according to this unequal distribution.

But look at that graph. Calling this distribution a power law would be generous to say the least. There is a massive spike corresponding to just a few instances, and the rest of the graph is nearly invisible to the naked eye, so tiny and so overshadowed by just a few giants. Frankly, this distribution is closer to the Dirac delta function than a power law.

All of your comments in this thread seem to have been a strong defence against perceived criticisms of the Fediverse, when the article isn’t so much criticizing it as it’s proposing that it needs additional safeguards (besides decentralization) to ensure it remains aligned with users’ interests:

• Firstly by alleging that the author advocates everybody running their own instance

• Then by nitpicking that massive concentration in 3 instances has totally different implications to concentration in 1 instance

• And now alleging that the author only considers Fediverse successful if all instances are the same size.

These are really disingenuous and uncharitable ways to read the article. I’m sure the author has a perfectly good understanding of the concept of Federation, as they detailed several examples, and they have a lot of experience in highly technical computer science work.

Then it seems like we’re in agreement. The thrust of the article is not that the fediverse is bad, or that it doesn’t improve upon the FAANG cartel model, but rather that decentralization by itself is not a silver bullet. It also needs to include the “bottom-up consensus seeking” that e.g. Wikipedia uses for its decision making.

Maybe I’m not quite following you. Out of 3070 instances, 50% were registered in just the top 3. Whether it’s the top 3 or top 1, doesn’t this clearly show a tendency to cluster into large centralized monoliths? This type of power-law clustering is ubiquitous in all kinds of human behavior, but this would correspond to a really high exponent value for the distribution.

The article contains a graph showing that (at least at the time it was written) Mastodon was strongly dominated by a single big player, with the top 3 instances holding 50% of users.

They don’t complain that not everybody will host their own server, quite the opposite:

Nor is it enough to “save ourselves”, self-hosting our own decentralised digital islands, while ignoring the reality of the masses. We cannot close our eyes and rest, content with freedom in our personal bubble, ignoring the reality of our non-technical friends and family who do not enjoy the same luxuries of privacy and free speech.

What I think they’re saying is that over time, people gravitate to the biggest instance (which seems to be happening right now with lemmy.world), which can lead to effects that work against the goals of decentralization.

I’m not sure that they are personally advocating for anything particularly precise, but in the end of the article it mentions Wikipedia as an inspiration for the “information democracy” model.