The Lemmy User Experience is Better When Centralized into Fewer Instances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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 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.
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’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 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Totally disagree, the more tech savvy can spin up their own single used instances if they want, be fully in control of their own content and participate just like anyone on any large instance bar being defederated. All for basically free
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.
Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit
The power Reddit has over these users is they believe that to be what they want. But have you ever run into a longtime Redditor who says it's perfect the way it is? Not just recently, either.
I agree that some kind of centralization is important to a good UX, at least for an entry point – centralization reduces cognitive load as someone is trying a new service out. But I disagree that this centralization needs to be at the server level.
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.
Why wouldn’t a centralized, curated set of communities that span multiple servers work? This is basically the Lemmy Community Browser, although I think it could go one step farther to just have a button to subscribe to all of the top 50 communities. (tbc, I think people should curate their communities as humans, but having a little push to start is helpful.)
Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other.
Why do you think this? My understanding is that Beehaw’s defederalization was communicated to be a temporary workaround for a lack of moderation tools needed to deal with spam from large open-registration servers – not competition. (I’m taking that post in good faith, which could be wrong.) Any other signs of competition?
It would be more beneficial if ppl registered in small instances, right? Since it has better traffic than instances that are overloaded and also enjoy the same content
I mean, people will naturally flock to the biggest instances.
But if you have even 100 ACTIVE users, they'll "discover" the vast majority of communities for you, after you manually search the most popular communities.