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I'm definitely seeing the benefits of belonging to a smaller Lemmy instance today.
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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I think the fediverse will function the best if everyone is split across many instances. As soon as one or several become dominant, the way they do things becomes the norm, for good or bad. That and the server load of course.
People just seem to flock to a few popular instances. The join Lemmy website needs to push harder for joining the instance that fits your interests.
Does it make that much of a difference which instance you’re on? I created an account here, but I’m subscribed to communities across the entire fediverse. Defederation can of course come into play, but unless you create an account in each instance that fits your interests I don’t see it making too much of a difference where your account has its home.
It doesn't really matter where you sign up, of course unless your instance is defederated. Users just tend to funnel towards a few instances, putting some strain on the instance's servers instead of everyone being more dispersed. Lemmy.world is pretty slow right now due to the influx of users going there.
Yeah. The need here is for people to distribute across instances so the load is evened out. I’m still on the fence about what I think about the distribution being “interest”-based (there’s of course the Local filter which I haven’t used that much yet). I’m sure it’ll grow in me 🙂
Could you explain a bit more? I am new to lemmy (reddit exile) and I thought the instances are like servers and they communicate between each other.
What do you mean by instance that fits your interest?
Thanks.
It's more of a way to try to spread out the users and communities by interests. Also decreasing the server load for the instances. Instead of having 90% of the users and a majority of the communities on Lemmy.world that is basically having everyone centralized again and the website goes dark if their servers fail.
I signed up to my country's instance and lemm.ee instance. I like the lemm.ee mods
The problem is most people are confused and overwhelmed by all the instance business to begin with.
It's a UX thing. Users can't be expected to read up on all the technical details of instances and the pros and cons of different ones before signing up. I don't know how it'd work exactly, but they really need a nice and simple "sign up" page that they don't need to think about.
Maybe a list of all the decent instances to use - meaning pretty much all instances that are not catered to a specific niche, open to new users and don't have any defederation drama ongoing - and then a global lemmy signup page can just randomly assign new users to one of those instances.
I cannot explain the exact details but I remember during the first great Twitter exodus some people discovered a drawback in the ActivityPup protocol that seems to cause performance issues when very influencial users post on a small/under powered instance.
Because communicating all that stuff to many other instances is more costly than spreading it only to people on the same instance. So technically speaking large instances have a performance advantage and must just scale accordingly to the user number.
Everyone agreed that this need to change in oder to ensure a healthy federated ecosystem but I don't think it was be fixed by now.
Yes, it definitely provides opportunity for bad actors to control Lemmy.
If reddit wanted to they could offer the admins of beehaw, sh.it.just.works, and lemmy.world money for control of the servers and then if accepted defederate the three largest instances from everywhere else, basically killing Lemmy or at least severely hindering it's growth.