this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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The core devs have always been pretty open about how they don't want lemmy.ml to be "the flagship instance". To them, it's just the instance that they run, and so happens to have the history of being the biggest instance back when lemmy was growing its user base.
They actively encouraged new/other instances be created and pushed new users during the reddit migration to other instances, rarely listing their own instance in the list of recommended instances on join-lemmy.
So it's not the flagship, and intentionally so. And while lemmy.world is the biggest by far, it is also arguably not the flagship either due to the lack of having the core devs or contributors as admins of that instance. All of which means lemmy has done something most other platforms have struggled with (I'm looking at you mastodon.social!), which is flattening the power structure amongst the devs and admins such that there is no real flagship, an all around good thing IMO.
To be fair to Mastodon, most of the things I tend to be interested in with it have at least made it to Fosstodon which is thriving pretty well.
I'm not sure what you're referring to actually by "made it to Fosstodon". Both mastodon.social and fosstodon would be running the same software, unless fosstodon are running some sort of fork which would make sense.
I was referring to how mastodon.social is by the largest mastodon instance (like it's not even close) and is run by the mastodon group/company itself who have control over the software, app, joinmastodon.org web page etc. That's getting pretty centralised.
Case in point, around May mastodon altered their mobile apps to set mastodon.social as the default server for creating a new account. Since then basically all new mastodon accounts have been only on mastodon.social. Now making the server selection process easier for newcomers makes a lot of sense, but it didn't need to be done in a way that both highlighted and amplified the already notable centralisation. At the time a bunch of people got upset and pointed out alternatives. But mastodon the company didn't say anything and of course there wasn't anything anyone could do. And now, mastodon.social grows by about the same size of the next biggest english speaking mastodon instance every couple of months and no one likes to talk about it because they can't do anything. By reasonable approximations, the fediverse is mastodon, and mastodon is becoming mastodon.social.
Numerically, by Monthly Active Users (MAUs) mastodon is
~85%of the fediverse, and mastodon.social is~25%of all of mastodon, or,~22%of all of the fediverse. (See fedidb)Something like that happening with lemmy seems less likely, even far less likely, just because of the flatter power dynamics.
I totally understood what you meant in this case I meant "mastodon" referring to the "flagship" mastodon instance - mastodon.social. What I'm saying is that the fosstodon instance is thriving - about 90% of the things I follow comes from there and not mastodon.social. Sure in the general scheme of things it hasn't worked well on the federation front (although there was that period where mastodon.social shut down registrations - not sure if they opened up) but certainly for some groups and interests (in this case FOSS) it worked out just fine.
RIght! Good to hear.
Yea mastodon.social opened back up. And from what I gather they put up a kubernetes cluster so that they can scale easily, which is exactly what they're doing.