i’ve seen the sentiment that most of the growth being on lemmy with .world taking on the large share of users isn’t necessarily positive. other than the fact that the point of federation is decentralizing, what kind of issues arise from congregating heavily in a single instance?
i know even in just .world there a few redundant communities and i imagine that this is compounded in other instances. i don’t suppose i should expect or even want monolithic communities at the whim of just a few moderators or admins, but i don’t want to miss out on discussion and content for communities i’m interested in.
i guess i’m just curious what the development of communities and their interaction should look like with federation, and how browsing and engaging with these disparate but related spaces is going to work for the average user.
apologies if my questions about federation are basic or these questions are well known and understood for those who have been a part of communities like this for longer than i have.
The main issue with the size of .world so far is just the technical stuff. Lemmy hasn’t really been tested at this scale before so we’re seeing various bugs and federation issues that have probably never been seen before either.
Personally I don’t think the Beehaw thing was a problem for people outside of the walled garden, only for those in it. I had an account there but had to move off to keep access to my fave communities, whereas the ones on there I was using from my .world account all have alternatives elsewhere so that account wasn’t “punished” like my Beehaw one was. This is of course a huge advantage of the community split, one instance can’t arbitrarily cut off your access to a certain topic.
What I’ve been doing is just subbing to all communities for a given interest, and seeing how it goes. Sometimes there are different goals /atmosphere in each, or sometimes I’ll just cross-post to all of them and see where folks are biting. I’ve already seen a couple of very niche communities start redirecting people to the bigger competitor so some amount of centralisation is just going to be natural over time.
Until all the kinks with federated content are ironed out, I’m content with a few big instances. Hopefully we get tools to migrate communities with comments to different instances in future, so that we can break down big communities into smaller ones.
Federation is going to start meaning that admins are going to have to enforce standards, and those standards haven’t been fully fleshed out.
Beehaw has shown itself to be willing to temporarily defederate major servers due to spam issues. What makes Beehaw’s defederation so important is because Beehaw seems to host several pseudostandard subs, so losing access to Beehaw will impact the growth of servers’ user base.
I expect that the discussions Beehaw is having with other servers is likely going to create a standard set of admin responsibilities for this federation. I don’t expect this to be the only federation as it seems like one of the rules is going to be “no Nazis”, as it should be.
no nazis is big, hope we can keep that up.
Like the German saying … "if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.”
If you have a social media server with a small Nazi group freely talking and no one says or does anything about it even just existing on your server, you have a Nazi community.
I don’t know the answer to any of your questions, but the duplicate communities thing is definitely an interesting problem to have. I mean, reddit had plenty of duplicate communities as well, but they each tended to build up their own personality which I always found interesting.
For example, I subscribe to TeslaMotors and TeslaLounge on reddit (I drive a model 3) and I find them both super valuable, but they’re also super different. TeslaMotors tends to be breaking news but overly positive and gets grumpy whenever you post anything remotely negative about the company or its cars. TeslaLounge is much more realistic, where people can freely talk about the things they love about their car, but also the quirks and negatives without getting flamed.
@caephi@lemmy.world more of a pro than a con; large instances are less likely to be defederated, for the same reason that no email provider would ever block “gmail.com”.
i think my concern comes from the idea that large instances could set the pace for how other instances operate. if admins for lemmy.world wanted to enact certain policies the fact that they have the largest userbase would encourage other instances to fall in line since they wouldn’t want to defederate from the largest instance.
i should also admit that i’m not completely aware of the process through which instances federate and defederate from each other. i assume it’s up to the discretion of the admins of each instance, and then once many begin to federate together the admins of each have their say on who can be included, with defederating occuring if there is no longer alignment between an instance and it’s federation. correct me if i’m wrong, but if this is correct, large instances like lemmy.world would hold an unequal share of bargaining power in these circumstances.
Your post is a bit confusing. You seem to be using Lemmy to refer to lemmy.ml? and just .world to refer to lemmy.world? Or do you mean Lemmy as in all instances? Or Lemmy the software? Or the threadiverse in general?
maybe i mean .ml. i was under the impression that .world and .ml were closely related but distinct instances, as opposed to kbin which is federated but not as closely related as lemmy instances. like i said, this is new to me so i’m still getting a handle on how everything exists and interacts.
i think the core of what i’m curious about is if there is an issue if a singular instance in the ‘threadiverse’ gets large enough and if that has negative implications for other federated instances. if users largely centralizing in this decentralized platform detracts from the goals of federation?
Honestly, the complaining is the standard “our clubhouse” kinda vibe you get absolutely every time this happens, where a community grows rapidly from small to medium. Literally, every single time.
While I understand the complaints, its always struck me as a little silly for people to make them in a place that was clearly intended to grow large. Like reddit for instance. Or a server called lemmy.world, seems to me to be signaling a clear intention to seek to become large.
I mean, yes, the tone changes. It’s going to go through several evolutions, not just one. And every one of them will bring complaints. It’s just people being people, “get off my lawn” is probably a sentiment roughly as old as the animal kingdom of biology?
That said, I deeply appreciate that the Fediverse actually has a built-in solution for them. Which they of course already know, they’re just bitching and moaning, that’s all.
Regarding community duplication, that is the system working as intended. If someone wants to combine them into one, it would not be difficult to make a program to do this.
And regarding duplication, you can see something similar in Reddit where you end up with multiple subreddits with just sightly different naming but with the exact same purpose. I really don’t see how people see that as an issue. Eventually it’ll solve itself like it did in Reddit, people just join the biggest community and the rest die out.
But multiple communities would be much better because if one goes down or gets defederated or just goes to shit the community as a whole would still exist. It just needs a separate content aggregation layer so that all content from the same communities end up in a single feed.
