this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I mean... that's on you, then. Historically, that's not how the Fediverse has worked, and it likely will continue to not work that way. Things could always change, considering the Twitter exodus and now the Reddit exodus, but the way most Fediverse services are set up seems to encourage smaller communities rather than large, centralized ones. Plus, if you have centralized ones, what happens if admins go rogue? What if the servers go down? What if, what if, what if? With decentralization, you avoid so many issues that come with having those large, centralized instances. Of course, there are downsides, but if you want something centralized, maybe try something like Tildes?
Twitter is a extremely good fit for ActivityPub as there you are following users, while in Lemmy you primarily follow communities whose strength is determined by number. !technology on beehaw is better than !technology on an instance of 10 people.
By centralized, I mean to be in the 1-4 large instances on Lemmy that people flock to from smaller instances. Right now, the design of the Fediverse encourages former Redditors to join the biggest instances. Discovery tools might spread out the users and make solo instances more viable, but the activity may still be concentrated in the same few instances.
Every instance has the potential to be standalone like Tildes by defederating from everybody else once they hit critical mass. Like Truth Social on Mastodon. Or Kbin before it Federated.
I think we just need better discovery and aggregation. If everyone is looking at an aggregation of "/technology" from every federated instance then there's no reason to flock to large instances.
Isn’t there a big danger of advertising and influence moving in if you have a handful of centralized servers?
Sock puppet accounts to influence the conversation don’t make economic sense when the people you are influencing number in the thousands. They do when you are in the millions.
Paying a server admin for influence or a hand on the scale makes no sense if that server has thousands of users mostly subscribed to your handful of communities on your handful of large instances.
Yes, the user experience is easier, but I think it opens things up to community attack scenarios that a wider federation of of servers with a wide distribution of popular communities makes more difficult.
And to be clear, I don’t mean attack as in taking systems offline. I mean attack as in moneyed interests doing the type of thing moneyed interest does on all popular social media. Things that I believe make the user experience worse.
My fear is that your desire for centralization to make the user experience easier creates a system that makes the user experience worse in a way that makes it much more difficult to fight.
What fediverse services are set up that way? For most projects, the flagship instance is by far the largest. For Mastodon it is something like 900k difference between the next most popular instance.