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.
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.
I started on one of the smaller instances, and guess what? They didn’t make it. I spent about two days setting up my account searching for all the communities I wanted, and had a great feed. Then about a week later, they were gone. I can’t fault the admin- they were doing a lot of work and running up a server bill largely for gratis, but I lost all that setup time. So when I had to start a new account I chose to go to one of the moderately large instances because I didn’t want it to go poof overnight again.
What I’m saying is there is safety in the medium to large instances.
That said, I do have some problems with some of the largest instances throwing their weight around in performing global bans on users from other instances whose world views differ from theirs.
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.
I made an account on lemm.ee, thought it was a bad idea since all the communities were on .world. After this whole fiasco though, I'm happy with my decision.
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.
Think we need universal/transferrable accounts to make this happen. People, myself included will be concerned that if they sign up to a tiny instance someone's hosting on a raspberry pi or something that it'll just disappear without a trace one day and their account along with it
If accounts were made portable I think a lot more people would disperse
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.
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.
Their recent actions have convinced me to move to another instance
Correct me if this is already a thing, but it would be nice if you could post to multiple communities at once and have users see comments across all communities and instances. So a user posts “A” on instances X, Y and Z all under communities run on those instances at the same time. When making the post, you select ehich communities the post goes to instead of just one. Users on instances X, Y and Z see it as a single post it appears in all of the communities the user specifies. A limit might be useful here to prevent trial spam. A user commenting on the post in instance X will be seen on the other instances and communities where that post was made.That way, you could remove the centralisation on instances and communities (one community or instance might remove the thread, but everybody else still sees it and each others comments in the remaining communities/instances.) This has a few advantages:
- People are incentivised to post to smaller communities knowing that larger ones will also get the same post and everybody can see each others comments.
- If a moderator of a community removes the post, it still disappears in their community, but not the whole instance. If the thread still exists in other communities in the same instance, users of that instance can still participate in the post on those communities.
- If the post is banned instance-wide, it is banned across all communities in the instance at once. This could include non-local communities.
- Users in other instances will still be able to see the post and continue contributing to it. You can only remove the post from your own instance.
If everyone was spread out onto different instances
Each instance with an owner/operator making rules... that the average social media user walks in, orders a drink, and starts smoking without any concern that neither one may be allowed. People can be loyal to their media outlets even when it is beyond obvious they are bad. People raised on storybooks that endorse bad behaviors and values, HDTV networks, and social media too. Audience desire to "react comment" to images and not actually read what others have commented - nor learn about the venue operators and reasons for rules is pretty much the baseline experience in 2023.
Can I move a community from one server to another or do I have to delete the old one and recreate it elsewhere? Because I have a community on .world and would like to move it somewhere else, probably feddit.de
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.
Lemmy world has like 3500 active users a day. That’s not large. That’s going to be the base for a small decent instance in a year.
While I agree, it's pretty ironic to post this to the second largest lemmy instance =P