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How did Lemmy World become the default instance?
(mander.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Asklemmy
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For the same reason cities form: the larger they get the more benefit there is to being there, so they keep getting larger.
I like the federation model and have switched from twitter/reddit to mastodon/lemmy. Still, we should expect and plan for massive instances, because of their inherent advantages. (More users = more content, more referrals to new users. Lower cost per user in terms of servers/resources)
Ultimately what I'd like to see are democratically run instances. Right now each server is essentially a benevolent dictatorship, which is fine when they're small and/or you don't have much invested in an account. Once they start to get big and making a change is a lot of work, it becomes more problematic.
Social.coop on mastodon is cool, however not necessarily geared to scale. I think if there was a multi-stakeholder coop where employees can make a living and users get input on how it's run, that could really take off.
I guess that is what people coming from corporate social media believe, but federation means that anyone, regardless the size of the instance, can interact with anything. When I switched from lemm.ee to Mander, which is a lot smaller, my user experience barely changed aside from that I can now browse science communities with 'local'.
e: grammar
That means nothing to the average Joe. Joe saw a comment mentioning Lemmy under a post on reddit. Got curious, went to join-lemmy.org.
"What the fuck is an instance? - he thinks. I don't care, where are the posts? Okay, a lot of these things seem to be specific domains, maybe they are for specific countries or interests. I don't have any of that. The fuck is federation? I don't fucking care, show me the posts already. Okay, .world is the largest, the name implies it's for everybody. Cool, register. Next, next, fucking finally here are the posts."
That's why.
But that doesn't make a lot of sense since it doesn't matter on what instance a community is hosted or a user first registered. That's the whole point of the Fediverse...
It makes a difference for the person hosting an instance. Suppose you're hosting an instance with ten users, and you run into some kind of configuration issue, and stuff isn't working right. Or maybe the server cost is more than you expected. You might just decide to let it shut down. If you have ten thousand users you might decide to stick it out because people are counting on you. Or you're getting donations from a hundred people, so you decide to make it work because so many people are counting on you, or maybe there's a specialist who's also a user, and they help you figure out the issue.