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The Lemmy User Experience is Better When Centralized into Fewer Instances (monero.town)
submitted 2 years ago by Jeknilah@monero.town to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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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[-] schmonie@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 years ago

Reddit isn't totally free of this problem (feature) either--You can have multiple subreddits dedicated to the same topic.

IMO while the federated communities might feel fragmented if you are used to reddit, it's the main benefit of using Lemmy and something that should be embraced. Concentrating content into only a few instances defeats the point of federation.

Take the current issue as an example: A gigantic community defederated from another gigantic community leading to a comparatively large wall between the content of those communities. Had they been smaller, the impact of this issue would therefore also be smaller. This affects other communities which get content from beehaw as well, since there's now less interaction between a large portion of the fediverse user base.

It's only natural that large communities will bubble to the top however, and there probably isn't a good answer to how to 'balance out' those communities, or if that's even beneficial at all.

[-] Taxxor@feddit.de 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Reddit isn’t totally free of this problem (feature) either–You can have multiple subreddits dedicated to the same topic.

True, but there you don't have the problem that you can access subreddit "gamingB" but not "gamingA" because you happen to be logged in on an instance that defederated "gamingA".

You can just access all of the different subreddits with one account and freely choose on which on you'd like to post and always able to see every post ever made in every sub.

With Lemmy as it is now, I don't even know if the posts I see in a community on InstanceA really are all posts because there might be posts made by people on InstanceB that is blocked by InstanceC that I'm accessing the community of InstanceA with.
That's my biggest concern right now.
I noticed this today when I had a comment chain on lemmy.world that I accesed with my lemm.ee instance. That chain was >10 posts long with several different users from different instances.
When I looked into that community with my feddit.de account, I could only see the first two comments of that chain, not even my own lemm.ee comments were visible despite not being blocked by feddit.de.
It was because the third post of that chain was made by a user on an instance that is blocked by feddit.de and that lead to all following posts also missing.
So now I'm feeling like I'm possibly missing big parts of all those comment sections just because I happen to be on an instance that blocked someone that might participate in them.

Hell, I don't even know if you can see this post because it could be that your instance defederated from my instance.

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[-] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 2 points 2 years ago

I mean, people will naturally flock to the biggest instances.

But if you have even 100 ACTIVE users, they'll "discover" the vast majority of communities for you, after you manually search the most popular communities.

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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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