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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (8 children)

If big instances are already defederating from each other then I don't see how Lemmy can grow like many of us want it to. I mean, now any new user who randomly chooses Lemmy.World as their server is going to get a much worse Lemmy experience and they won't even be aware of it. (Come to think of it, maybe I'm getting a lesser experience right now because maybe my server defederated from another big server that I'm not aware of.) This seems like a flawed system, or at least it seems like a system that isn't intended to have much user growth.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Maybe it should be a common practice to list larger servers that you've chosen to defederate from? Beehaw is being forthcoming about it, so at least people know what they're missing out on. And I don't think they'd have a bunch more hidden away from us. Now, if a community does this and tells no-one, that could be a genuine problem. Making an account on another instance is a little annoying, but it's not that bad if you're old and accustomed to classical forums.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

All servers running lemmy are open about it... Check the very bottom of your instance page and click "Instances". In their case it's

https://lemmy.one/instances

And for you it's

https://beehaw.org/instances

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't notice the instances link down there. I've edited my comment.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

No problem! Lots of exploring to do... it's a whole new world for a huge amount of us.

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