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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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This ignores the social aspect. If instances are allowed to wall themselves off from other instances or fracture how the federation works, that means leaving the big instance for the smaller one isn't much different than leaving reddit for lemmy.
We basically see this in microcosm on Reddit itself. Such as when a subreddit for a topic exists and is modded by shitty mods. If that subreddit is the "main" one for that topic, the moderation can be terrible but the users will stay rather than start an alt sub. The alt sub simply will not grow because, to spite the terrible moderation, people simply won't be bothered to spend time on a smaller sub and build it up while the big one exists. The moderation has to be extremely, untenably bad to kick off the mass adoption of an alternative, otherwise the alts just kind of exist with a fraction of the interaction and growth of the "main" sub.
The problem is user lock-in, and that's not easily solved with code. It's a social problem.
I agree and this will be true for any social platform. This could also happen to communities within lemmy.world.
I think the main advantage of lemmy (or activity pub in general) is the fact that it's protocol is open source which allows people to spin up their own versions of a platform without end users "necessarily" having to change clients (this obviously implementation specific).
The fact that activity pub is federated is a bonus because it makes the whole "moving to a different community" easier but i see the fact that its open source as a much bigger benefit.
This feels like suggesting that vegans just allow beef and chicken so that more people will be vegan and it'll be easier to stick with. Federation is a core tenet of the Fediverse. It's not necessarily about getting the maximum amount of new users in the shortest possible time.
If a user is super turned off by it, there's plenty of growing community forum sites they can try, like Squabbles.io, Tildes.net, Raddle.me, or Hive.blog. I personally don't think the alternative of stripping the core philosophy of federated, decentralized software out of Lemmy, Mastodon et al. is necessarily desirable.
Federation has it's complications and challenges, that can and are being met all over the Fediverse as it grows - it's not necessary to turn the entire concept on its head to gain faster user adoption. Lemmy doesn't need to be a Reddit clone - Lemmy is a direct response to the failures of the centralized web, where the main purposes are monetization and societal manipulation, where scraping the users' data is the means to someone else's ends. The Fediverse has a chance to be so much better than that, provided we don't screw it up.
All just my personal thoughts; I appreciate the conversation.