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Is Lemmy's growth good and what federation will look like? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by caephi to c/[email protected]

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i've seen the sentiment that most of the growth being on lemmy with .world taking on the large share of users isn't necessarily positive. other than the fact that the point of federation is decentralizing, what kind of issues arise from congregating heavily in a single instance?

i know even in just .world there a few redundant communities and i imagine that this is compounded in other instances. i don't suppose i should expect or even want monolithic communities at the whim of just a few moderators or admins, but i don't want to miss out on discussion and content for communities i'm interested in.

i guess i'm just curious what the development of communities and their interaction should look like with federation, and how browsing and engaging with these disparate but related spaces is going to work for the average user.

apologies if my questions about federation are basic or these questions are well known and understood for those who have been a part of communities like this for longer than i have.

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[–] Candelestine 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Honestly, the complaining is the standard "our clubhouse" kinda vibe you get absolutely every time this happens, where a community grows rapidly from small to medium. Literally, every single time.

While I understand the complaints, its always struck me as a little silly for people to make them in a place that was clearly intended to grow large. Like reddit for instance. Or a server called lemmy.world, seems to me to be signaling a clear intention to seek to become large.

I mean, yes, the tone changes. It's going to go through several evolutions, not just one. And every one of them will bring complaints. It's just people being people, "get off my lawn" is probably a sentiment roughly as old as the animal kingdom of biology?

That said, I deeply appreciate that the Fediverse actually has a built-in solution for them. Which they of course already know, they're just bitching and moaning, that's all.

Regarding community duplication, that is the system working as intended. If someone wants to combine them into one, it would not be difficult to make a program to do this.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

And regarding duplication, you can see something similar in Reddit where you end up with multiple subreddits with just sightly different naming but with the exact same purpose. I really don't see how people see that as an issue. Eventually it'll solve itself like it did in Reddit, people just join the biggest community and the rest die out.

But multiple communities would be much better because if one goes down or gets defederated or just goes to shit the community as a whole would still exist. It just needs a separate content aggregation layer so that all content from the same communities end up in a single feed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

It's more of a problem for Lemmy because federation isn't really smooth yet and there's not an easy way to just point people to the popular community. There's also the current degeneration hype, so there's constantly a risk you just lose access to certain communities, and there's no good notification that it happened.

[–] caephi 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

yeah, i agree the issue of multiple communities serving the same purpose is minor and i don't expect it to be an issue as time goes on.

maybe it's not as much of an issue as i think but my concern would be if one instance has the vast sum of users would others be discouraged from defederating with it. if a benefit of being federated is being easily discoverable by users, than having the largest userbase would make federating with that instance inherently more valuable as communities would want to be found by those who would participate.

it could be that it wouldn't be a big issue to exist away from large instances, and i'm sure many communities wouldn't need or want to seek out users through large general instances. i just wouldn't want admins of large instances to hold unequal power over smaller federated instances that would want to reach the largest userbase.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

From what I'm seeing, I think the general idea is that defederation should be a last resort unless the goal is a secluded community. So you really would only defederate from large instances if there's an issue, so it'd be worth it and can be reversed when the issue is resolved,

if you didn't want your instance connected anyway, so then it doesn't matter how big they are.