this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Every network that wants to stay decentralized has to guard against anyone gaining a controlling interest.
Once an instance gets big enough, it generates a kind of gravity, attracting not just the majority of new users, but tempting everyone else. And a few years or decades down the line, we end up with a centralized service. History has shown that anyone with the capacity to be a controlling interest eventually exercises that control to serve its own ends.
I don't know if anyone is discussing the potential problems of existing good-faith instances becoming too large, but I think we should be. A Meta controlled instance would instantaneously dwarf any existing instance and maybe the totality of all instances.
Yeah, I'm already a little offput by how lemmy.world seems so dominant.
Yes, I've started looking for instances that I think represent the "natural home" for communities I'm interested in. For example, I was subscribed to a lemmy.world community for the go programming language. Then I discovered the programming.dev instance. They also host a go programming community, so I switched.
Then I realized that I was likely to join a bunch of communities on that instance, so I just joined the instance directly. I think that reduces the federation burden, but it also helps me manage my personal feed because now things are grouped by more general categories.
The only thing I don't like about doing things that way is the multiple inboxes. It would be nice if the client would collect all the inboxes into one.
I guess browser extension would be well suited to add account-switching/aggregating. Likewise mobile apps.
The mobile client I'm using, Liftoff, does an excellent job of both account and instance switching.
this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can't keep a large instance controlled by "the enemy" from destroying what we've got, then we just have to do better next time.