Technology

It sounds like you are describing new user experience.
And I understand, coming from Reddit, how this can be a shock.
However, that's how Lemmy works.
Similar to how twitter users got a shock moving (or trying to move) to mastadon.

The very nature of the fediverse works better with more instances, where a single instance has fewer users and the communities are more focussed.

Beehaw hasn't "blacklisted everyone from...". They've defederated. Whilst it may seem similar, it's more nuanced. And that's what a lot of people don't understand.
Block-listing all users from lemmy.world from interacting with beehaw would be an amazing ability. That would put beehaw in a read-only state for users on lemmy.world, whilst still allowing beehaw users access to lemmy.world.
Unfortunately, the current admin/mod tools do not allow for that. And manually dealing with the huge influx of toxic users (posting death threats, illegal porn or trolling) was taking too much time.

Besides, the lemmy.world admin is working on custom tooling to deal with this issue. Because it is their users causing this issue, and it is their problem. And there is no higher authority - there are no Reddit admins to say "stop brigading".
Shitjustworks, last I heard, weren't responding to communication.
I have no doubts that beehaw will refederate as soon as Lemmy.world sorts their mod issues, or the Lemmy framework allows for more nuanced mod tools.

You have to remember that Lemmy is young.
It's been around for a few years, but the shear scale of what is happening now is less than 2 weeks old

There seems to be a lot of FUD going around with the defederation news. The problem, as most problems seem to currently be, is the population is exploding and the tooling isn't there to support the real growth in numbers. Beehaw has been a community for quite a while, and they were just here first so have more established communities, you can't blame them for that. They have every right to defederate instances, especially when their main concern is being able to moderate content for their users. Each instance serves their users first, other instances lack of user moderation shouldn't be their problem. They said they'll open back up once they can manage the moderation work load.

As for the fragmentation, this is really how lemmy was designed to be. There is talks of adding federated community listings and community browsers to lemmy itself to support discovery. Really, these features just weren't needed a couple weeks ago and now they are. In my opinion, the larger communities should have communities on multiple instances. You can cross-post across instance communities as well. Hopefully in the future the fragmentation can be fixed via the use of tags and other possible organizational tools that help federation but keeps things decentralized.

The established instances have dominance due to the first-mover advantage, which is causing the centralization at present. Overall, the experience is going to be different to a lot of reddit users due to the very nature of decentralizing things. I feel confident solutions will be found for most of these issues, and make the federated experience easier to navigate while still supporting the decentralized nature. But the fact is, this isn't and never will be "reddit' as it was, which was a centralized system with a single authority (the ToS and admins).

I think the issue that beehaw had was one of insufficient moderation tooling. Very solvable, and the admins even say that, but they also said they can't stand around waiting for mod tools to become available, so they're using the tool they have for the time being. If Lemmy catches on, I'm sure these issues will be solved in due time.

Hard disagree. Centralization is what enables rich dickheads to seize control of what ought to be the commons. Dispersing the community into many small nodes that communicate with each other is the safeguard against that happening. Ideally it shouldn't matter which node you call home.

Gross blech gross yuck. No, please god no. I'm subscribed to communities from loads of instances. The whole point of federated applications is that no one really has control over the whole.

This is exactly what happened with the early waves of mastodon migration; a whole load of instances suddenly had to up their game, there was defederation all over, and tooling had to improve to handle mod needs in larger communities. We’ll get there, it’ll stabilise. In the meantime, fund your server and thank your mods :)

And this is why I didn't sign up for a large instance.

I'd rather joine a smaller one that doesn't block any instance, neither is it blocked by other instances.

I just want to slowly find new communites and join the ones I think have good discussion, regardless of where they are hosted. I don't need babysitting.

I don't want an experience similar to Reddit though. I want a small active community with shared values and a variety of subjects.

Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit

Beehaw has been it’s own thing for a couple years now. It has never wanted to be Reddit. They have done such a good job of curating their instance with excellent communities and membership that the Rexxitors want to join it and make it into THEIR replacement for Reddit.

Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other.

I think it's clear Beehaw isn't working to be, or wanting to be, a replacement for Reddit at all.

Beehaw only defederated from Lemmy.world because of the currently limited moderation tools in the software. This is not going to be a problem forever.

I hope people can find communities both on large instances (Beehaw, Lemmy.world) as well on as very small niche instances. Discoverability is a bit a problem but I think over time we will find communities we like, and participate in them. What instance they are hosted on is not all that important.

I would disagree.

What happens when everyone flocks to beehaw, or lemmy.world- Is those instances end up going pretty slowly.

People from other instances can still read, can still post, and can comment. This, for example, is popping up on my newsfeed.

A post, on beehaw, written by a user on monero.town, being read by a user on lemmyworld.com.

Also, when beehaw defederated with lemmy.world, that is no bueno too.

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.

I don't think so : in mastodon, people knows they can federate. After trial and error process, they choose their instance based on reliability, moderation and the topics inside.
I think lemmy/kbin will follow the same path.

This kind of stuff follows Zipf's Law so it's 100% expected that there will be 3-4 instances aggregating the largest amounts of traffic, but instances smaller than that will constantly shift around and grow, organically, rather than be compounded and corralled artificially by one platform. In other words, this is just statistics playing out and we're nowhere near the end.

I’m really diggin’ it. I was just looking through the list of subs that Lemmy has on their site and found programming.dev. Asked to join, and zero reason to go elsewhere. I can subscribe to damn near anything easily, and my instance has a pretty chill main section(not sure what you call it). Programming focused, but plenty of cat picks, wild bird pictures, random memes…

I think I’m sticking around for a while.

I think instances need to be more focused. For example monero.town, very focused on Monero. If people are interested in other technology, sub to an instance focused on that, etc. but there is no reason to have all the communities on all the instances. I don't see how mega instances that try to replace reddit are viable in the long term, especially if they start to defederate.

This isn’t “one or the other” IMO. There’s room for niche instances hyper-focused on a generalized topic like “math,” “comp sci,” “sports,” etc.

But then there should also be a massive generalized instance (hopefully 2 at least so the competition keeps admins in check) that has a little bit of everything and acts as a Reddit replacement. We can have our cake and eat it too.

If big instances are already defederating from each other then I don't see how Lemmy can grow like many of us want it to. I mean, now any new user who randomly chooses Lemmy.World as their server is going to get a much worse Lemmy experience and they won't even be aware of it. (Come to think of it, maybe I'm getting a lesser experience right now because maybe my server defederated from another big server that I'm not aware of.) This seems like a flawed system, or at least it seems like a system that isn't intended to have much user growth.

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, ...

I think that the Lemmy equivalents to big subreddits will be centralized around a few larger instances and they'll come to dominate the all timeline, but more niche things seem like they can crop up anywhere. My favorite subreddits were always the smaller ones anyway, so federation will be important for me.

Also, it matters that there are a few big instances instead of just one. If one goes full spez the others can take up the slack until a smaller general purpose instance can take its place. For example, if beehaw does go nuts and just keep defederating until it's completely siloed instead of this being a temporary measure until moderation is more under control, then I can just make another account somewhere else and these communities will become less important. I don't think that's likely, but it's a problem that solves itself in a federated system.

this is the way its supposed to work, reddit is a bunch of fragmented communities too, the only thing you share is a domain.

Beehive blacklisted Lemmy.world? Mhm and that's why we need decentralised instances. I don't care about how beehive views Lemmy world as I can access still both as I am from an entirely different instance :)

I think a lot of issues with federation can be solved with improving the code. Lemmy is still a very new product.

My hope is that federation will end up having a halfway setting, where content can come across but engagement is limited in some way. For example, you may see a post from lemmy.ml but you would only see comments from beehaw and the upvotes you give it will be calculated locally. This would allow content to be visible from everywhere but would keep the communities separated to some degree. Also having personal opt-in federation may work, just like with NSFW, you could on your account allow a particular instance to come through while someone else would not select that, leaving you with a fairly personalised experience.

It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.

I don't think this is completely the case. Some instances will suffer from overzealous mods and admins, others will suffer because of absent ones, others will have too strict or too lax rules. That's unavoidable in any large number of communities. But Reddit is preparing and doing something that the vast majority of Lemmy instances will never do, Reddit is trying to prepare for an IPO and to have to show growth to shareholders on top of advertisers.

If that is something that could be done by a Lemmy instance, if that is botched it would be even easier for Lemmy users to jump ship to other instsnces and potentially defederate from the IPO instance.

I'll toggle from local to all if things are a bit slow, but I generally regret it. The chatter "over there" was that Beehaw is the place to go, and it just happens to run on Lemmy software.