cross-posted from: https://lemmy.perthchat.org/post/302114
let’s address the possibility that like mastodon/matrix 99% of ppl will flock to the biggest handful of servers
What is the real value of decentralization given that? Outside of like political unrest.
And what role do small servers really do in that landscape? Obv “novelty” servers like midov cater to the like lolicon enthusiasts and I’m sure there are a few other servers dedicated to illegal things. Regional severs are quite compatible with various nationalists/patriots
let’s address the possibility that like mastodon/matrix 99% of ppl will flock to the biggest handful of servers
That’s just human nature. There might be things to do, but they’ll only have a small effect.
What is the real value of decentralization given that? Outside of like political unrest.
The ability to easily switch. A protocol to automatically migrate an account could he nice.
And what role do small servers really do in that landscape?
They keep the big servers honest.
Currently, it seems unlikely. You’ve got Beehaw, Lemmy.ml, Sopuli, and Lemmygrad as your largest instances currently so we’re already seeing significant decentralization. Even in the last few days I’ve noticed a bunch of tiny instances popping up. As time goes on, people gravitate towards the big servers, but even a handful of big servers is better than the monoliths of Reddit and Twitter.
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let’s address the possibility that like mastodon/matrix 99% of ppl will flock to the biggest handful of servers
This doesn’t appear to be happening in a serious way. There are 7 servers on join-lemmy.org with more than 100 active users, which puts them within 10x of
lemmy.ml. It’s not clear to me that this is a major problem.But even if users to substantially centralize, these things make Lemmy categorically different from centralized social media:
- Even just two instances that interoperate and are run by different people/groups is MUCH more robust against bad admin behavior than 1 instance with no interoperability. If either set of admins starts doing something extremely unpopular, there’s very little barrier to folks migrating to the other instance. Doing so doesn’t even cut them off from communities on the other instance… Though if the problems are serious whole communities can move as easily as large groups of people can agree to do anything together.
- The ability to stand up new instances makes Lemmy MUCH more robust against the admins of the major instances colluding to something extremely unpopular. It’s not EASY to stand up a new instance to serve a large user count, but it’s possible, which is more than can be said of reddit/Facebook.
These two properties act as incentive to “keep admins honest”, and as a powerful escape hatch if they behave badly. They have a cost in that it’s easier for communities to splinter for stupid reasons, and for people to “take their toys and go home” over small disagreements. But they make the ecosystem as a whole much harder to hijack. If people aggregate on big instances, it’s because those instances are run well and people like being there. If those instances stop being run well, the ability for anyone to stand up alternative instances that interoperate enables people to leave badly run instances with a much lower opportunity cost than leaving a centralized social media service like reddit, Twitter, or Facebook.
I joined Lemmy very recently and the concept of the different federated servers was easily my biggest stumbling block in signing up.
At a glance, it’s really hard to tell what choosing a server represents. Even now, I’m pretty fuzzy on it and could barely explain it to my partner.
Even after getting a rough idea of how the federated server concept works, it’s not easy to know which server has the right vibe/ content for you.
This, to me, is the biggest cause of congregating on the larger servers. Without a resource that can easily explain the differences between each server (and why it matters), it requires more effort than the average person is willing to expend to choose a non-“default” server.
The best thing is it doesn’t really matter where you sign up at, every community is equal if you subscribe to them
But it does matter, doesn’t it? My understanding is that your account data lives somewhere on the server you join, so you need to have some level of trust in that server. When I joined Lemmy yesterday, I saw some of the more popular servers were overloaded, so I joined a small one that seemed reasonable. But I guess that instance was having some trouble, and I couldn’t get content and search to load on the site. I swapped over to a more popular instance and seem to be running fine, so I guess it was instance-specific issues.
And also, I imagine an unreliable site could go down without warning, and take your account with it.
Or do I totally misunderstand how this fediverse thing works? Either case, it’s probably a decent idea to host your own instance if you can, but that introduces a pretty high barrier to entry.
I think it’s almost inevitable that users in their initial migration will troop to the more visible aka biggest instances. In time it should level off and people join a handful of the bigger federating instances
Why would it level off? The bigger instances will always be more visible and therefore generate more users and content right? Why would that change?
There were some suggestions to change the order of instances on join-lemmy.org so that smaller instances are shown near the top. So that could help to spread out users better.
Perhaps a couple of random instances can be picked out every day/week to be featured?
That could work but it would have to be coordinated with the admins of those instances.
Might be helpful to new users to curate a short list of “good” instances (semi-popular, good history of availability, open enrollment) and show them in a periodically-shuffled order as “recommended” or “popular” instances.
That, along with some github issue ideas I’ve seen relating to helping users get subscribed to places here, would probably help simplify the experience.
There are already recommended instances at the top, we just need to update them. I will make a post about that tomorrow.
Aha, sorry for spinning your wheels there! Sure enough.
This is exactly the thought I had. Add some randomness into what shown it will definitely help I’d think.
We actually see it happening on Mastodon.
Yes, the marquee server gets the bulk of the new signups, but accounts that are actually active long-term end up migrating to other instances all of the time. New users are seen to acclimate to the idea of the network, and if they’re inclined do often end up looking for a home that’s better suited to their interests.
They start at the big stop, generate their social graph, and then migrate. And there’s nothing wrong with this pattern, especially in the face of the pathological frictionlessness that corporate social media has fetishized and promoted.
Oh yeah that makes sense. I thought it would be a Galton-Watson process like the one that led social media to mainly consist of 5 websites posting interactions on one to the other.
It almost certainly would be if account migration wasn’t possible.
I think we’d see even more migration if Mastodon had post migration. I don’t personally get why people are so hung up on that one, but, then, I’ve probably just been broken from a decade of having my favourite online communities die at the feet of Reddit.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with post migration once Calckey 14 goes gold. It could end up being adopted by other non-Mastodon microblogging servers, and then a shift not just away from mastodon.social could occur, but away from Mastodon the product. Not such a big one that it would topple the beast, as it were, but a big enough one to ensure the ecosystem remains healthy.
It almost It almost certainly would be if account migration wasn’t possible.
This is possible? Does it work with Lemmy instances or only other fediverse apps? Unfortunately web searches come up almost exclusively with moving from reddit to lemmy when looking for account migration stuff :/
AFAIK, you can’t migrate lemmy accounts yet. I believe it’s a planned feature.
But you can absolutely migrate Mastodon accounts to other Mastodon servers, or to some other server types (Calckey I know for sure). You can’t migrate posts, though. Calckey has an experimental feature for importing posts, but I believe it puts a pretty heavy load on the site.
As someone new to the platform, the initial sign up process was a little daunting. Despite spending some time reading about it, and asking a couple of questions on reddit, “how to choose an instance” wasn’t a question I could easily find answers too. I gravitated towards larger instances assuming that the sign up process would be more streamlined, support would be better, and there would be less risk of permanent closure.
That being said, I plan to move to a smaller instance or host my own as my familiarity with the platform grows. I’ve seen similar sentiments by others on here as well
I’m personally kinda hoping that we will see less “general” Lemmy instances but more “interest oriented” or “alignment oriented” instances. I applaud the startrek / programming / piracy instances. Even the tankie and altright nut job instances are useful.
Edit: oh I just replied to a 2month old comment my bad
but lemmy.ml is locked, and only https://sh.itjust.works accepted me, without issues. lovely platform, btw.
