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The Lemmy User Experience is Better When Centralized into Fewer Instances (monero.town)

submitted 1 year 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 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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't access subreddit "gamingA" because you happen to be logged in on "gamingB" and those two defederated

[–] unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

Also, it was common on Reddit to be automatically banned from a community if you participated in/subscribed to other communities.

Just being subscribed to certain communities meant that bots would track your comments and downvote you elsewhere.

This lead to artificial groupthink and corporate manipulation of the site due to the bots keeping track of dissent. The Reddit hivemind was seemingly very singular and unified on certain topics because of this behavior.

Regarding the Fediverse, instances blocking other instances are not ideal, but it's a perk of federation. Alt right sites like Gab and Truth Social are also using these technologies, but have been blocked from federation to the rest of the Fediverse. A single site can quickly and easily devolve into the next Voat or Poal.