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.

  • AtomHeartFather@ka.tet42.org
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    1 year ago

    Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I’d prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could - hopefully - at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There’s a reason why every community shouldn’t be on a single instance. It’s a single point of failure.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      1 year ago

      Very frustrating for sure, I feel like I’m constantly playing ping pong with new users.

      New user doesn’t understand lemmy and searches for community on service like lemmy.ml. Community doesn’t exist so the spam the “Create Community” button or spam the admin for it. Admin is overworked/doesn’t know/busy building the site and says “okay”, meanwhile there is already a community of 100+ members on another instance.

      For me, I built my instance to take some weight off of the main instances, thought “hey here’s a group of communities that are pretty close knit that don’t need to put pressure on the already overloaded servers”, and I still get people who are posting “I made ____ community on lemmy.ml come join!” and it’s like dude, ffs.

      • If it doesn’t exist seriously you could have made it on my instance and modded it, give the central servers a break. I’m all for spreading the love but seriously, don’t just make it by default on the popular instances
      • If it does exist, ffs just look around. At this point most communities on Reddit have something analogous here, or ther’es something similar you could post in first asking if there is one. “If /c/cyberpunk2077 doesn’t exist maybe ask /c/gaming first. (and yes, cyberpunk2077 does exist)”.
      • This is separate from if you don’t like a community and you want to truly create your own. That’s great, you should feel empowered to do so, but don’t just spam the “Create Community” option if you haven’t even tried to see if it’s out there yet. At the very least, search out some instances and figure out where your best home should be. At this point it probably isn’t lemmy.ml or beehaw.org.

      That turned a bit more ranty than I expected.

      • AtomHeartFather@ka.tet42.org
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        1 year ago

        Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.

        Peoples are lazy. They don’t want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn’t know it exists, its wonky at best.

        If a user cant type “Stephen King community” in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn’t exist OR they are going to be hitting that “Create Community” button.

        • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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          1 year ago

          For sure, as much as I want users to be smarter… well my experience in development tells me they never will be. I literally had one user ping me on Lemmy asking how to join, I gave them pictures detailing steps. They were on mobile and gave up because “The subscribe button was in the sidebar and it was too confusing”

          That’s what we’re up against. The extra button click was too much for some users.

          Lemmy has to get more user friendly when it comes to subscribing. You’re absolutely right it needs to be one search and click “subscribe”. They should bring the feddit browser into lemmy really.

          • Taxxor@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            I feel you. When creating an UI you can think of thousands of possibilities which might not be clear to someone and design it in a way that couldn’t possibly be misunderstood, then show it to different people who all agree that it’s clearly structured and logical… and the minute you release it you get posts from users you didn’t know could even exist on their own.

            • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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              1 year ago

              yup, which is exactly how the lemmy devs must feel about us, “wtf it’s so simple”, but everyone’s brain works differently. As a dev myself, you really do kind of start to resent your users after a while

    • towerful@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      That’s not a hot take.
      That’s where I think the threadiverse/lemmyverse/fediverse/whatever is (hopefully) going to end up.
      The big instances are like browsing /r/all. The focused instances are going to be where it’s at.

      “Oh, rust? Yeh, you want the rust instance, or maybe the programming instance. Not here in the gardening instance”

      • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        The focused instances are going to be where it’s at.

        And far easier to moderate. You could have 1,800 communities on the Rust instance and still know content anywhere should be about Rust or Rust-adjacent.

      • supernovae@readit.buzz
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        1 year ago

        Different paradigms for different tools. I think niche on mastodon and calckey is meh - people need agency. Niche on kbin seems fine because people have agency regardless of server they’re on.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Counterpoint, allowing people to create their own communities is how new ideas for communities come up. If it wasn’t for that freedom, people wouldn’t have come up with ama, meirl and all the other weird concepts that took off

      • AtomHeartFather@ka.tet42.org
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        1 year ago

        I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to create a new community. I’m saying that due diligence should be taken BEFORE creating a new community, to be sure that community doesn’t already exist.

        • AnonymousLlama@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I’d say for the majority of people who are coming here from Reddit, the concept of federated servers and looking for duplicates would be a pain. I think most people who come to a site like kbin search to see if there’s a local community and if not would want to create it.

          Admins I’d assume would be able to search connected other sites to see if a community exists elsewhere, but that sounds like it puts more work on them when they’re busy with PRs and infrastructure work.

          I’ve got no idea about what the best approach is, but it needs to be somewhat simple it we want people to join and stick around I feel.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Mental bandwidth. By adding the requirement of a mod approval before creating a new community will cause most people to not bother at all.

          • cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business
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            1 year ago

            As a counterpoint to that: any new community that gets created on an instance is now a possible liability the site admins have to own.

            Makes a lot of sense that you wouldn’t want anyone to make anything on your site, since that’s how you end up with /r/jailbait, and /r/fatpeoplehate and so on.

            Seems reasonable you’d want to make sure you understand who is creating what and why on a platform you’re ultimately responsible for.

            • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 year ago

              It’s really not difficult to delete a unwanted community. The cost benefit analysis I think still leans towards open for all, as a breakaway success story makes up for it.

              • cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business
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                1 year ago

                It’s not just the difficulty, it’s that the fediverse runs on reputation.

                If you get a reputation for being an instance that has offensive/illegal content, you’ll get defederated and your users will get a materially worse experience than the rest of the instances that are federating with each other - and it really only takes one or two things to get that reputation.

                sh.itjust.works is a prime example: it didn’t take an awful lot to get them down the defederation road, and I suspect most admins would want to maintain their reputation and an easy way to do it (until we get like… moderation tools) is to just gatekeep what communities show up on your instance.

                • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 year ago

                  Actually that problem is usually registered users going into established communities of otherwise instances and trolling, not new communities pooping up that nobody knows about.

    • vikinghoarder@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      although having the same community in different servers might serve a purpose as well, I try to subscribe to the “same” community in different servers, this way you don’t have centralization since if one goes down, the others are still up, and you can post to whatever server and interested people will see the post (assuming everyone does the same).

    • Jeknilah@monero.townOP
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, I do like throwing hot takes out there. XD But I do think that you are asking a lot when you ask people to limit the scope of their instance.

      It will always be easier to just add another community under a larger instance than to go out and self-host your own niche from scratch. There’s certainly a temptation for an instance to go mega and general-purpose.

      I’m not disagreeing that a single instance is a point of failure- just that people are willing to make that trade-off.

      • AtomHeartFather@ka.tet42.org
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        1 year ago

        I was never insinuating that an instance owner should limit their scope. But just because you run an instance doesn’t mean you have to be the home node for all the communities you are interested in. It goes against the idea of federation. If a community already exists on another instance, as an instance owner you should subscribe to that community rather than making your own. That increases resilience.

        • Jeknilah@monero.townOP
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          1 year ago

          Interesting. Do you think there will be steps to make communities more focused? Like a hypothetical deal where lemmyworld will give up “gaming” if kbin gives up “technology”?

          • AtomHeartFather@ka.tet42.org
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            1 year ago

            Honestly, I hope not.

            For example, if all the “programming” communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn’t take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.

            There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps.

            • Jeknilah@monero.townOP
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              1 year ago

              I’m often wrong, but I have a hunch that it will be necessary if the goal is to avoid centralization. I do think it would be sensible to limit the broadest communities (politics, tech, gaming) to two central “node” instances; very curious to see if it will get to that point.

    • notfromhere@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      I would rather a lemmy instance only supported a single community. That would force the horizontal scaling better

      • roboTRASH@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        That would be extremely wasteful in a resource sense. You would need more overhead, more domains, more everything to support that.

    • MadCybertist@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      This is why Squabbles and Tildes will probably do well in the end. They are much more strict on allowing people in at the start, MUCH easier entry and just simpler to understand overall.

      • ethane@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        But any site which restricts sign ups is going to turn off 50% of the people who show up.

        • Markoff@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Squabbles has unrestricted sign up, but from what I see it’s becoming Reddit very fast, just same intolerant hivemind already calling for downvotes so they can downvote inconvenient opinions despite they are presented in civil way and don’t break rules, so might as well stay on Reddit for same experience