cross-posted from: https://lemmy.perthchat.org/post/302114
let’s address the possibility that like mastodon/matrix 99% of ppl will flock to the biggest handful of servers
What is the real value of decentralization given that? Outside of like political unrest.
And what role do small servers really do in that landscape? Obv “novelty” servers like midov cater to the like lolicon enthusiasts and I’m sure there are a few other servers dedicated to illegal things. Regional severs are quite compatible with various nationalists/patriots
I think it’s almost inevitable that users in their initial migration will troop to the more visible aka biggest instances. In time it should level off and people join a handful of the bigger federating instances
Why would it level off? The bigger instances will always be more visible and therefore generate more users and content right? Why would that change?
I’m personally kinda hoping that we will see less “general” Lemmy instances but more “interest oriented” or “alignment oriented” instances. I applaud the startrek / programming / piracy instances. Even the tankie and altright nut job instances are useful.
Edit: oh I just replied to a 2month old comment my bad
There were some suggestions to change the order of instances on join-lemmy.org so that smaller instances are shown near the top. So that could help to spread out users better.
Perhaps a couple of random instances can be picked out every day/week to be featured?
I joined Lemmy very recently and the concept of the different federated servers was easily my biggest stumbling block in signing up.
At a glance, it’s really hard to tell what choosing a server represents. Even now, I’m pretty fuzzy on it and could barely explain it to my partner.
Even after getting a rough idea of how the federated server concept works, it’s not easy to know which server has the right vibe/ content for you.
This, to me, is the biggest cause of congregating on the larger servers. Without a resource that can easily explain the differences between each server (and why it matters), it requires more effort than the average person is willing to expend to choose a non-“default” server.
The best thing is it doesn’t really matter where you sign up at, every community is equal if you subscribe to them
But it does matter, doesn’t it? My understanding is that your account data lives somewhere on the server you join, so you need to have some level of trust in that server. When I joined Lemmy yesterday, I saw some of the more popular servers were overloaded, so I joined a small one that seemed reasonable. But I guess that instance was having some trouble, and I couldn’t get content and search to load on the site. I swapped over to a more popular instance and seem to be running fine, so I guess it was instance-specific issues.
And also, I imagine an unreliable site could go down without warning, and take your account with it.
Or do I totally misunderstand how this fediverse thing works? Either case, it’s probably a decent idea to host your own instance if you can, but that introduces a pretty high barrier to entry.
