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The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves: Cohost and the Fate of Centralized Platforms
(audiovalentine.com)
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I don't know what Cohost was but I'm pessimistic about Lemmy these days. Note that the link is to an article moaning about the centralization of sites like Reddit and that Cohost (whatever that was) failed because it was run by the same type of people. At first I didn't click on the link because it says "audio" so I expected it to be audio and I didn't feel like listening to one. It's a written article though.
Why? The userbase is quite stable, and new platform are emerging (Piefed, Mbin), and more people are probably going to come the next time Reddit messes up
The instance system is confusing for new users and they might not even realize that they're missing out on a lot of content by signing up to the wrong instance.
In the end it's just a bunch of centralized websites sharing content if the admins feel like it and sure you can create your own instance but another admin can decide to defederated from yours anytime they feel like it, that's still a lot of power in the hands of a single person...
Both front and back end need to be decentralized and also separated from each other. Make all content available to all and have people develop a UI to access it, let the users curate their feed.
This way people sign up on one page and can use the same credentials no matter what page they go to, the competition for front end devs is to offer the best UI, the development for the hosting part is what's done as a community on GitHub or whatever...
What you're describing sounds closer to how atproto is supposed to work, but it's yet unproven in regards to decentralization.