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A few is still better than one. But I think there will always be nerds who want to start their own server, enough that if a big server mismanage we are free to move to smaller ones and still receive the same posts.
Hopefully user migration will be implemented at some point to facilitate this ( https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985 ).
Would be great to be able to change instances and maintain an easily accessible record of posts/comments/etc.!
Receiving the same posts isn't quite the same thing without the same community, though.
You see two posts, both of the same gif.
One is upvoted 200 times, with 50 comments
The other upvoted 50 times with 2 comments.
What link do you think is more attractive? Both to you and to a passerby with no context?
I wish that the same posts across multiple instances could be merged together. So instead we just see the one post upvoted 250 times with 52 comments
I think as long as we have 3 main big instances, we are decentralized enough to survive any type of attacks.
Just like word usage, company sizes, countries, and many other "rank based" systems, despite being decentralized, tend to gravitate towards a distribution where for every rank you go down, the amount of whatever it contains halves. For example with countries: (Where China and India are exceptions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank%E2%80%93size_distribution#/media/File:Rank_order_countries.png
This is known as Zipf's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law
So yes, these systems are still decentralized, but people to a certain extent prefer to become part of larger groups, but if they are not disturbed, there will also be enough people that will remain in the small groups. So as long as those smaller groups exist, and a big one falls apart, it's extremely easy for users to migrate.
And the small instances, as long as they work together, still hold a significant portion of the people.
I would agree with this except we've already seen countless examples of how unwilling the average user is to try an alternative if it's smaller. It's that same mentality that allows places like reddit to destroy their user experience without consequences. It takes a significant amount of whipping and nut kicking to get most people to try something else if it would mean leaving the platform where everyone else is.
And it's not just reddit, a lot of other terrible platforms of all types endure solely because users don't want to leave the big shared community. The lock-in is real, and it's a huge problem in the tech space that we don't talk about enough.
What scares me about Lemmy going forward is the potential for instance admin abuse to frame how the federation takes shape. We're already seeing it to some degree. The fracturing of the federation across instances in ways that are invisible to the users.
Unbeknownst to most users, when they look at post on their instance of choice, they may not be seeing everything they should be seeing. It's hard to mount a resistance to anything when users across instances are simply not on the same page.
The first is just human nature. That's not a problem with decentralization, but with humans. And it's always a tipping point, it's impossible to make decisions that are 100% agreed on with enough people. But just like Reddit is learning now, once you've pushed it above a certain level, you're going to be bleeding users to either smaller or larger communities. Zipf's law says nothing about how those transitions happen, just that it "gravitates" towards settling in the distribution it over time. You don't know how long it will takes before the hierarchies settles again.
The second isn't really an issue with Lemmy. Since the protocol is fully transparent, you have sites like https://the-federation.info/ which provide full transparency on the statistics. There's also no way for instances to "speak on behalf" of another instance, so if one instance tampers with things, it will be plain and clearly visible on other instances. There are also other ways for people to talk to each other besides through Lemmy itself. If a conspiracy like you're saying would take place, the news would eventually reach the users of the instance being affected, and another Reddit will occur.
For once the power is much close to the hands of the users, and not some CEO who isn't beholden to anyone.
I disagree it's something we don't talk about enough though, since we're talking about it right now, and it's been a very frequent discussion point regarding pretty much every big site. Not to mention it's the talk of the day for the last month or so because of the Reddit API changes. Hell, if the discussion hadn't been had in the past, we would've had another centralized Reddit-like clone right now, and not the fediverse.
I know a lot of fediverse users are very principled on federation and decentralization, but in think the real question is does it really matter? To the average user that just wants a website with funny pictures, bad memes, and posts looking for advice, why should they care that lemmy is decentralized other than the fact that it mages it harder for them to use the service in shell but real ways?
The fediverse has opportunities here to gain mass adoption, but taking a super principled stance that users should join small instances and avoid popular ones because that’s hire the fediverse is “supposed” to work pushed it into the sense problem Linux has for a very long time (and to some extent still does). The average person wants something to work and doesn’t really care if it’s free/libre or decentralized. If those things bring real, actual benefits then great, but if they introduce friction and trade offs then they will go right back to Reddit (or twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc). Some may say good riddance, but social platforms need people and if enough leave then the whole thing falls apart.
Another important factor to consider is that it doesn't need to be perfect to be better. Having options to continue using a platform is better than not having viable options. The fact that Lemmy is open and has some built-in resistance to being owned by a single entity is a huge step forward--even if it's not without the drawbacks of generalist instances.
The thing a lot of people dont seem to get about centralization is that it's much more a social phenomenon than a technical or corporate one.
Things will eventually gravitate towards a handful of big instances. People want to be where other people are.
The difference will be the federation. As long as everything stays federated, this won't be a problem.
Except...once an instance gains dominance, defederation becomes a defacto way for that instance to declare what is and isn't worthy of visibility.
Defederation absue by large instances is going to be a much bigger issue than centralization.
There are more than 1000 instances right now.
While I do believe many have been created just out of the "impetus" of quitting reddit so not all all them will probably survive in the long run, there are already quite a few created for very specific purposes like science, music, etc.
I think it's normal for most people to gravitate around the most popular "generalist" instances, but that doesn't mean lemmy is not decentralized, it still is considering the large amount of different instances, and also just because of the fact that anyone at any moment can spin up a new one if they want to do so, that's impossible with centralized stuff.
If admins do someothing instance users are not happy with they can move to another instance
Unlike reddit where it was all centralised
This ignores the social aspect. If instances are allowed to wall themselves off from other instances or fracture how the federation works, that means leaving the big instance for the smaller one isn't much different than leaving reddit for lemmy.
We basically see this in microcosm on Reddit itself. Such as when a subreddit for a topic exists and is modded by shitty mods. If that subreddit is the "main" one for that topic, the moderation can be terrible but the users will stay rather than start an alt sub. The alt sub simply will not grow because, to spite the terrible moderation, people simply won't be bothered to spend time on a smaller sub and build it up while the big one exists. The moderation has to be extremely, untenably bad to kick off the mass adoption of an alternative, otherwise the alts just kind of exist with a fraction of the interaction and growth of the "main" sub.
The problem is user lock-in, and that's not easily solved with code. It's a social problem.
I agree and this will be true for any social platform. This could also happen to communities within lemmy.world.
I think the main advantage of lemmy (or activity pub in general) is the fact that it's protocol is open source which allows people to spin up their own versions of a platform without end users "necessarily" having to change clients (this obviously implementation specific).
The fact that activity pub is federated is a bonus because it makes the whole "moving to a different community" easier but i see the fact that its open source as a much bigger benefit.
This feels like suggesting that vegans just allow beef and chicken so that more people will be vegan and it'll be easier to stick with. Federation is a core tenet of the Fediverse. It's not necessarily about getting the maximum amount of new users in the shortest possible time.
If a user is super turned off by it, there's plenty of growing community forum sites they can try, like Squabbles.io, Tildes.net, Raddle.me, or Hive.blog. I personally don't think the alternative of stripping the core philosophy of federated, decentralized software out of Lemmy, Mastodon et al. is necessarily desirable.
Federation has it's complications and challenges, that can and are being met all over the Fediverse as it grows - it's not necessary to turn the entire concept on its head to gain faster user adoption. Lemmy doesn't need to be a Reddit clone - Lemmy is a direct response to the failures of the centralized web, where the main purposes are monetization and societal manipulation, where scraping the users' data is the means to someone else's ends. The Fediverse has a chance to be so much better than that, provided we don't screw it up.
All just my personal thoughts; I appreciate the conversation.
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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