I feel like this instance is getting too big and all the content is being centralized here. Am I right or there are other instances thriving too?
Wherever I go I keep seeing lots of lemmy.world users and communities and kind of feel worried about centralization.
There are many other instances. Feel free to join them :)
I wish we could transfer accounts
C’mon. No single instance has as many users as any of the top 20 sub reddits I bet. Spreading out over 5 main instances is fine. The important thing is if one instance shits the bed, you have options. If the community isn’t served properly they can easily jump to a new instance.
programming.dev is thriving but we are also a niche, lots of good communities for developers.
You’re not wrong. There needs to be slightly better/more informative marketing that your communities are accessible from anywhere, and locale of the server doesn’t matter.
People are joining lemmy.world before they learn/understand they can access communities from any federated node (which is nearly everything except beehaw)
Agreed, I did and am still figuring it all out. It’s not so easy for those who aren’t tech savvy
But only in the early stage. If you got it once, it‘s like cycling a bike.
Best to understand ist to create another account on another instance and then subscribe the same community there. Then you can check which posts and comments are shown how on the feed
It doesn’t help that most instances are named/marketed as being for a specific subset of people. Like French, Canadian, LGBTQ, NSFW, US midwest, etc etc. Lemmy.world is generic enough to appeal to most new users.
you have Lemmy saying, “join anywhere!”, but then all the instances are like “only join here if you are X, Y, or Z!”. It is understandably confusing for new people.
Exactly. Such things are only relevant for “local” content.
We need some regional americas instances, and more topical nodes like !startrek@startrek.website running their own whole instance.
At some point I’ll probably spin up a self-hosted instance, and rebase my operations there. In the meantime the fediverse needs content and users to reach a critical mass.
Over time I expect instances will grow and segment into more focused, specialized instances. Federation will keep things accessible so you might not need to follow. Communities of interest will grow around the instances that best reflect the spirit of that community.
Some splits will be amicable, some acrimonious, some out of necessity, others out if principle. Most will probably be because that’s just where the content ends up.
Give it time. Nobody knows how this is all gonna work at scale, but at least we’re doing it.
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Federation seems to have its issues though, unfortunately. I created a post on lemmy.world earlier today (in hardware@lemmy.ml), and it took about 15 minutes for it to show up on lemmy.ml and sopuli.xyz.
If we consider something that is breaking news, 15 minutes is WAY too slow; there will be tons of duplicates posted from dozens of instances, even if they are posting to the exact same community.
That’s most likely happening because of the over-centralization. If your origin server had been smaller federation to/from it and !hardware@lemmy.ml would have been significantly faster. Having a no-nonsense “urgent news” lemmy instance act as a hub for faster federation would be a great value-add for the community as a whole.
I think that is true. Could be because instances like Lemmy.ml don’t let new users create an account, beehaw unfederated other instances and kbin also has some problems with federation… So, only Lemmy.world can really thrive I guess. Other instances I have not seen that much. Maybe sh.itjust.works (or something like that) are thriving but I don’t know.
There are others, but not that big.
See: lemmyverse.net/
I’ve been using Kbin and from what I know they only have a single instance of Lemmy unfederated, and I’ve found a few magazines I really like so far, but most content I’ve seen has been from Lemmy
Oh, my bad. I thought I read it somewhere that it was having some problems because of CloudFlare protection so the site would not go down by the flood of new users.
To be honest it is to be expected, people will flock to the most active (and consequentially better maintained, at least subjectively) instances.
This might only change once these big instance become saturated and close signups, though even still I expect to see only a handful of Lemmy / KBin instances staying relevant once the dust is settled, especially with the recent precedents like Beehaw defederating from “too open” instances.
There’s still a world (no pun intended) of difference, between a single company with a single instance that doesn’t interface with anything else. And a large instance on a federated network :)
Totally agree.
Yup, I feel like a lot of people complaining of too much centralization don’t fully understand how the federation concept works. Even if a single instance goes down, turns evil, ect - all of the content would have already propagated to all the other instances. It’s not ideal, because those instances would loose sync with each other since the initial instance went dark but we wouldn’t loose the content but commenters can still discuss within their own instance.
Again, not ideal - but at least the content would be preserved.
So if lemmy.ml subscribed to lemmy.world, and world shut down with no warning, provided you aren’t a lemmy.world account, you can still access and make content on the world communities? Has this been tested?
this happened with lemmy.world and beehaw. after the defederation/shutdown, the blocked instance still has the old communities/threads and can interact with them, but they won’t be synced out to the rest of the fediverse.
Yeah, I’m trying to figure this out from a high availability standpoint. I guess the next question would be if all the servers are operating on the same out-of-sync server, probably not, as those servers aren’t connected together, they are just connected to the now-offline server. I wonder if the server comes back up if it propagates or trys to re-sync. Seems like we would have issues either way, and the best bet is finding an instance with good availability.
I was kind of hoping that if an instance subscribed to another instance’s community, then the originating instance can go down without effecting the community because another instance is now acting as the backup.
I’m also concerned if Lemmy as an application can support a large user base.
My understanding is that in the activitypub fediverse there’s considered a “true” version of a post/thread/etc. This is the one that is hosted on the instance that it was made. For example, the “true” version of beehaw communities is the one on beehaw. So all other instances then ask beehaw for the true version, and beehaw sends it to them. When someone makes a post on a beehaw community, they send that info to beehaw specifically. Then we simply indirectly see each other’s comments due to syncing with beehaw.
When someone then gets blocked by beehaw, such as lemmyworld, lemmyworld still has their copy of the beehaw communities and threads. It’s still their copy of it on lemmyworld. However, they can’t go ask beehaw for updates, and they can’t send their content to beehaw. As a result, no other instance would get lemmyworld’s posts on beehaw communities, and lemmyworld will stop seeing new posts on those communities from other instances (other than beehaw).
There might be something that lets the instance grab the data from another “non-true” version. But I don’t know if that’s the case. I was told no, but idk.
I was kind of hoping that if an instance subscribed to another instance’s community, then the originating instance can go down without effecting the community because another instance is now acting as the backup.
My understanding is no. While each instance makes a copy, I think without the originating instance, they end up falling out of sync. There is a way to fix this theoretically (since p2p does it), though I don’t think the fediverse is doing this. I think it might work for mastodon posts that you “reshare” though? I’m new to the fediverse so idk the details.
The way I think of it is more like internet achive copying reddit posts. if reddit dies, IA still has those posts. Yet IA’s version can’t accept new posts, and if reddit dies they don’t get anymore updates.
Thanks for the detailed reply!
I think people(people includes me, I tihnk the majority of users are new to this stuff) still don’t get that unless a certain instance de-federalizes others en masse, you’re still gonna be able to access it’s content and contribute from your instance.
Although, in general,I wouldn’t be worried. Even if a certain instance is getting big, you are still not subject to the whims of some venture capitalist corp in silicon valley.
still don’t get that unless a certain instance de-federalizes others en masse, you’re still gonna be able to access it’s content and contribute from your instance. Sadly it just happened with beehaw.org, one large instance defederating another. That’s a pretty big wall.
Although, in general,I wouldn’t be worried. Even if a certain instance is getting big, you are still not subject to the whims of some venture capitalist corp in silicon valley. Sadly corporations love to control everything and always end up giving small startups offers that are too good to refuse and they either take it over or shelf it forever. I really don’t want corporate control to return to the web. Reddit swallowed all the forums due to how convenient it was.
I’m aware of beehaw defederating. However, you gotta see how it happened. They were completely transparent about why they did it, and that it’s not permanent. Once moderation tools start to get added, we’ll probably see re-federation.
we’re doing fine here on kbin, a little too much growth tbh. lemmy.world is pretty active but it’s not the only active instance :)
That’s great. Love to see Kbin thriving but I wish more instances came online. I know that at least fedia.io exists
give it time. kbin is literally just a month old and most users joined in the past couple of days.
You could always unsubscribe from general communities in lemmy.world and subscribe to general communities on other instances instead.
Still most users remain on lemmy.world
I don’t think anyone can tell where we’re going. Mastodon.social was the largest instance by far for some time, then at the deluge, it splintered.
Part of the reason for Mastodon to fracture is specialization - each instance does something unique. Maybe Lemmy will do the same, maybe not.
But if we end up with 3 primary instances, it’s still decentralized - I think the most useful feature of Lemmy isn’t that we’re spread out, it’s that we could be.
I think this highlights a very good point. It’s totally ok for everything to gravitate to a central instance as long as that instance is run in a way that everyone is happy with. The key is the the moment something changes and users aren’t happy, the decentralised nature of Lemmy gives those users an exit strategy - a way to replace the bad instance and carry on.
If a single Lemmy instance becomes the new Reddit and then pulls a move that angers the community the way Reddit has recently, users wouldn’t be reduced to protests and hoping that management listen, they could just spin up new instances, mirror the content, and carry on like nothing happened.
The big, bad instance could just disable federation and all communities and user accounts would be locked on that instance.
There’s a ton of other messengers and there’s WhatsApp but as long as my family doesn’t move from WhatsApp I’m stuck with it.
Yes this, and I could totally see the startrek instance growing into a hub for sci-fi related communities for example. More important than whether we are spread out is that the possibility and capability we have to spread out or migrate instances keeps instances in check by ensuring they don’t have leverage or lock-in over the communities. Currently I think the main risk is communities living on 1 instance, but better instance migration tools would mostly mitigate that - imagine if you could migrate a community (which in underlying activitypub terms is very similar to a user account) to a different instance, the same way mastodon accounts can migrate between instances and keep followers.
Yeah a lot of Lemmy instances right now are mostly based on country or language, so.tnrte is some making use of the decentralisation. I’m hoping an art instance would pop up, then I might migrate.
An art instance is a brave move. Lemmy takes up a lot of disk space already, but encouraging images means a lot more disk space. Lemmy also allows multiple images per post.
That’s the thing, I don’t want one instance with too much control over others. That is a gateway to reintroducing corporate corruption into the Fediverse
Yeah, like how Spotify and the like are trying to take over Podcasts, which were designed to be open.
Heh, never been into Star Trek but I love how you guys have a Lemmy instance themed around it
TBH, I think the Startrek Community has the right idea.
I believe Lemmy instances should treat themselves like ye olde message boards. Have a specific interest and accommodate it. So a Star Wars instance, a Marvel Instance, a DIY instance etc… They should act like message boards, but with the key advantage of linking up with the greater federation.
Things like geography aren’t very conducive to finding content you’re interested in.
lemmy.world’s pretty big, but I’m still getting other places. More spread would always be good though. Counts from my all feed -
48 | lemmy.world 14 | beehaw.org 12 | sh.itjust.works 4 | lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 | lemmy.filmC’mon. No single instance has as many users as any of the top 20 sub reddits I bet. Spreading out over 5 main instances is fine. The important thing is if one instance shits the bed, you have options. If the community isn’t served properly they can easily jump to a new instance.
I think it’s ok, as long as federation still works and migration is sorted out. The problem with centralisation is the control that can give. If there’s a mechanism to move a community or user to a new instance without too much disruption, then the users maintain control and have recourse if the operators do something unpopular.
Mastodon has a pretty good system that automatically moves people’s follows to your new account if you move. We need something like that for Lemmy.
Decoupled from venture backed tech corporations is all that matters. Close second is actual people creating actual content, which feels like the case! Curious to see how moderation pans out in the long run, but at least it’s in the hands of the community itself.
It’s definitely not all that matters, but it’s probably the most important at this time.
A wider network is more robust in the long run, but people can always spread out later.
I think expecting individuals to solve this is a mistake. There should be something in the UI or in the backend that either automates this or makes it really really obvious that the preference should be to spread out. The problem will become more and more exasperated as/if more mainstream audiences migrate here (mainstream as in non-technical)
I think expecting individuals to solve this is a mistake.
There are more than enough options out there for the normies to be online. IMO It’s not insane to require that people give a shit and learn how this works if they get confused.
Once the first moderation bots arrive things will start sorting themselves out
