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If just a few Instances ends up having the majority of Users - Will Lemmy still be decentralized?
(self.showerthoughts)
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Just like word usage, company sizes, countries, and many other "rank based" systems, despite being decentralized, tend to gravitate towards a distribution where for every rank you go down, the amount of whatever it contains halves. For example with countries: (Where China and India are exceptions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank%E2%80%93size_distribution#/media/File:Rank_order_countries.png
This is known as Zipf's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law
So yes, these systems are still decentralized, but people to a certain extent prefer to become part of larger groups, but if they are not disturbed, there will also be enough people that will remain in the small groups. So as long as those smaller groups exist, and a big one falls apart, it's extremely easy for users to migrate.
And the small instances, as long as they work together, still hold a significant portion of the people.
I would agree with this except we've already seen countless examples of how unwilling the average user is to try an alternative if it's smaller. It's that same mentality that allows places like reddit to destroy their user experience without consequences. It takes a significant amount of whipping and nut kicking to get most people to try something else if it would mean leaving the platform where everyone else is.
And it's not just reddit, a lot of other terrible platforms of all types endure solely because users don't want to leave the big shared community. The lock-in is real, and it's a huge problem in the tech space that we don't talk about enough.
What scares me about Lemmy going forward is the potential for instance admin abuse to frame how the federation takes shape. We're already seeing it to some degree. The fracturing of the federation across instances in ways that are invisible to the users.
Unbeknownst to most users, when they look at post on their instance of choice, they may not be seeing everything they should be seeing. It's hard to mount a resistance to anything when users across instances are simply not on the same page.
The first is just human nature. That's not a problem with decentralization, but with humans. And it's always a tipping point, it's impossible to make decisions that are 100% agreed on with enough people. But just like Reddit is learning now, once you've pushed it above a certain level, you're going to be bleeding users to either smaller or larger communities. Zipf's law says nothing about how those transitions happen, just that it "gravitates" towards settling in the distribution it over time. You don't know how long it will takes before the hierarchies settles again.
The second isn't really an issue with Lemmy. Since the protocol is fully transparent, you have sites like https://the-federation.info/ which provide full transparency on the statistics. There's also no way for instances to "speak on behalf" of another instance, so if one instance tampers with things, it will be plain and clearly visible on other instances. There are also other ways for people to talk to each other besides through Lemmy itself. If a conspiracy like you're saying would take place, the news would eventually reach the users of the instance being affected, and another Reddit will occur.
For once the power is much close to the hands of the users, and not some CEO who isn't beholden to anyone.
I disagree it's something we don't talk about enough though, since we're talking about it right now, and it's been a very frequent discussion point regarding pretty much every big site. Not to mention it's the talk of the day for the last month or so because of the Reddit API changes. Hell, if the discussion hadn't been had in the past, we would've had another centralized Reddit-like clone right now, and not the fediverse.