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Yeah, we need to spread out a little more. Fediverse is not about having centralized concentrations that can be targetted.
Ideally every minor Instance could have one major community located there, that could serve as the central space for that particular community. That's pretty impossible of course, but it paints the picture.
I'm running a small instance, thelemmy.club
We even have built in Voyager/WefWef at app.thelemmy.club :P
I don't advertise is too often as I'm not trying to get huge, we have about 120 users and have been up a month. But we have plenty of resources to grow a little.
Mine is sorta like this, it's pretty quiet but then also happens to have the biggest Steam Deck community.
It's also got the biggest community covering the Russo-Ukrainian war: !ukraine@sopuli.xyz
It has a few niche communities. !anarchychess@sopuli.xyz was the first community on your server that I subscribed to.
Anarchychess was the reason I joined sopuli.xyz, before I understood how the Fediverse worked.
All of reddit could burn, but I needed my en passant fix.
Tinfoil hat theory: OG Lemmyheads are attacking the big centralized communities and taking them down in order to force all the new users to spread amongst the smaller instances like we're supposed to, preventing inevitable corporate control of the ActivityPub platform
I doubt that's anywhere close to the truth but I choose to believe it, crusty old hackers pulling the plug on their children for our own good
As possible as anything else, but it would be unusual. I find it strange that people are so eager to reach for unusual explanations when the actual, conventional extremist trolls absolutely exist. This would be 100% in-character for them, and would benefit their goals very clearly.
Occam's Razor.
Additionally, they would try to point the finger at absolutely everyone except for them, as that would clearly serve their goals of general misinformation and distrust.
To be totally clear, they literally said it's a tinfoil theory. To me that implies they're just wildly speculating.
That sounds like a good way to make people go back to Reddit
Why can't we have community tags for grouping? Like have a "tag" you can subscribe to that encompasses all "meme" communities, or "politics", etc. Then if something goes down people can default to whatever. Maybe you could even make it so if you wanted to post you could post it into tag and the tag decides based off metrics which community to actually post it in? Idk, maybe I am dumb. But that seems cool.
That's actually not a bad idea. It'd be cool to have communities, community tags, and post tags. You could choose to sort by whichever you want. You could go to a community, or you could just look at the "solarpunk" tag if you want, similar to Twitter I guess.
Ideally every minor Instance could have one major community located there, that could serve as the central space for that particular community. That’s pretty impossible of course, but it paints the picture.
You could probably do that if you had a centralised coordinator who could assi... I'll see myself out.
For communities, I feel like a good solution would be to let mods link similar communities from different instances together, sorta like an automatic cross post.
We are kind of doing that now over at !visualnovels@lemmy.comfysnug.space
Sidebar links to our related communities is the best we can do right now.
Part of the problem is discoverability. If people don't use my instance, they rarely know we have independent communities like !todayilearned@civilloquy.com. Some, like !games@civilloquy.com are really shadowed by larger versions where some sort of multi community subscription could help a lot.
I think part of the solution is to normalize the idea that you subscribe to all the communities on a topic you're interested in, even if they're small, so wherever something gets posted, you see it. Eventually some of those communities may be closed in favor of the more active ones, but as a subscriber, there's no opportunity cost.
I feel like we’re seeing the inherent flaws of the fediverse here in some aspects. A completely democratic spread or spread in general of communities doesn’t seem like it’s going to work. Real people and infrastructure are behind making sure instances with communities that serve large amounts of user requests stay up and operable. Infrastructure costs people and money, and people with right skills and fundraising skills are not evenly distributed.
If an instance touts itself to be a mega-instance, that’s one thing. Lemmy is still a confusing place to understand if I should create my own community or join one. Some communities and instances have a lot more % active users and moderators than others.
People are also lazy. Hosting your own instance is “easy” until you have a popular community, or handful of popular communities. Unless you treat it like a job, not a whole lot of people are interested in spending time figuring out fundraising and dev ops to ensure their community can deal with future user growth.
Money, talent, and physical infrastructure aren’t evenly and fairly available. So it makes it difficult to produce a federated universe that doesn’t reflect these things.
Can’t expect new users to go down the rabbit hole of trying to understand what instance they should make an account on. All instances will grow over time and we are seeing a lot of unevenness because of factors stated above. Instances will surely balance out as time goes on, so I think whoever is prematurely attacking large instances—whether they are doing so for fediverse axiom related issues or not—is making fundamental mistakes of fediverse theory.
Like the anchor tenant of a shopping mall.
Or every major community should exist on at least 3 instances for redundancy.
Or re-architect more like Usenet/nntp where (I think) each node would have its own copy of everything.
