assbutt

Many ActivityPub services allow you to seamlessly transfer your profile from one instance to another. It even sends messages that let your followers update so they follow you at your new address. Moving profiles isn’t a big deal. It’s Ok if they join a big instance at first, and move later.

But do people know that? Not a rhetorical question, I only have direct experience with kbin and only a week's worth at that. I had only the very foggiest idea what all of this was when I came to kbin and signed up. I've learned a lot more since then, but I'm still brand new to this.

If I have no complaints with kbin, why would I be motivated to look for a new instance? Should I be looking anyway? What compelling reasons exist to shop around, as it were?

There are compelling reasons why new folks join big instances and it’s not definitely a bad thing

Seems like the natural progression of this sort of thing, no? Has enough time even passed to tell if this is a problem or not? This is a bit of an aside, but I feel like there's been a lot of doomposting the last few days about imagined future problems. Have we really had enough time to make any actionable observations?

IDK why is everyone making accounts on the 3-4 biggest instances.

How do you expect a newcomer who has no understanding of content federation to find these low-pop instances? Of course everyone's joining the main handful, they don't know anything else exists.

I'd imagine most people coming from typical social media don't even realize that instances are a thing when they sign up on one. They've heard about lemmy or kbin or whatever, so they go to lemmy or kbin or whatever and sign up. Once they learn how it works, they've already established a profile on that instance; they're not going to start over on a new one.

How does that not defeat the entire purpose? You're suggesting one global 'sublemmy', as it were, with one global team of moderators. How is that in any way different or better than what we just left behind?