this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Technology

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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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[–] tau@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

Two obvious reasons for joining smaller, more local instances are language and region. At least along those axes, there will naturally be decentralization.

It just doesn't make much sense to have communities on instances where most people on that instance can't participate in discussions due to the language barrier or because topics are specific and only relevant to a certain region.

There are already plenty of growing instances like that for specific regions or languages that are likely here to stay: feddit.de, lemmy.ca, midwest.social, aussie.zone, feddit.uk, feddit.it, feddit.dk, feddit.nl, lemmy.nz, feddit.cl, feddit.pt, ...