Maybe? I'd fear instead that centralisation is pretty sticky without some massive failure and wouldn't expect much movement in the proportion of users on lemmy.world.

Which means, if I'm onto something with my critique, there may very well be a bit of problematic dynamic there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I’d fear instead that centralisation is pretty sticky without some massive failure and wouldn’t expect much movement in the proportion of users on lemmy.world.

It happened in August during the long DDoS attacks on LW.

I guess here it's less prevalent because the site is still accessible, and most of the users don't really follow closely the Lemmy versions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I guess here it’s less prevalent because the site is still accessible, and most of the users don’t really follow closely the Lemmy versions.

Yea exactly. A DDoS is the sort of failure I'd imagine you need to shift people off. Not that big/central instances are completely bad. I think they help get people into the ecosystem that wouldn't otherwise ... and they turn out to be a pretty natural and constant phenomenon in the fediverse (mastodon.social is also about ~25% of masto) ... to the point that I personally start to ask questions about alternative structures which we spoke about in another thread.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

(mastodon.social is also about ~25% of masto)

Mastodon was actively pushing to be the default instance.

This criticism was co-joined with the criticism that the Mastodon organisation had set the mastodon.social as the default instance during the signup flow on the apps. While the frustrations are understandable and there are certainly valid criticisms on that decision, crypto spammers do not manually sign up via the official app, making it more of an airing of grievances than actual critique on the spam defense policy by mastodon.social.

https://fediversereport.com/defederation/

Lemmy's community seems to be aware of the issue, and hopefully it will resolve over time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Mastodons community is also very much aware of the issue. There are some who even call for defederstion from large instances. The main impetus being mastodons people’s concern for safety and moderation, where big instances necessarily allow much more to pass through. So while there’s more of a push from the top to make mastodon.social the flagship, from the grassroots there’s very much a push against it (I’m loosely a voice in that might self).

Lemmy.world’s push to be a big vanilla instance is not much different from what’s happening over at mastodon I’d say not least because it’s run by people running one of the big mastodon instances.

In the end I’m not sure the two spaces differ that much in their dynamics around this, notwithstanding the differences in the attitudes of the lead devs, especially given that the same result has occurred. Which is why I say it’s likely a natural phenomenon. You’ll found the distribution of instance sizes likely follows a power law which is common in nature.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

So while there’s more of a push from the top to make mastodon.social the flagship, from the grassroots there’s very much a push against it (I’m loosely a voice in that might self).

That's good. I still think that having the developers pushing or not for an instance makes a different, wasn't Mastodon 40% Mastodon.social at some point?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Hmmm ... it might have been, I'm not sure. If so, not since or during the twitter migration, as my understanding there is that mastodon.social couldn't scale well and so it was up to all the other and often new instances to take on the load (similar to lemmy's story).

Since then, AFAIU, they've put their server on kubernetes so it can horizontally scale, and of course, put themselves as the default instance in the mobile app. But as user growth hasn't really continued on mastodon it's hard to tell what the dynamics are now. Having glanced at the numbers a bit over the past year my impression is that the proportion of users on mastodon.social has been slowly growing. I haven't seen any analysis though. I did some analysis early last year (https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110331433071884694) and maybe I'll repeat that soon.