let’s address the possibility that like mastodon/matrix 99% of ppl will flock to the biggest handful of servers
What is the real value of decentralization given that? Outside of like political unrest.
And what role do small servers really do in that landscape? Obv “novelty” servers like midov cater to the like lolicon enthusiasts and I’m sure there are a few other servers dedicated to illegal things. Regional severs are quite compatible with various nationalists/patriots
Regional servers are also pretty cool for people who would like to mostly see posts from people who share their local culture and especially language - not just for “patriots”.
Yeah, I joined a regional sever to have discussions on regional topics that usually don’t get any attention ouside the region. I am not at all patriotic. It’s the same reason I was subscribed to the city subreddits in my region.
I really think regional is the way to go. On reddit I mainly used local subreddits so it’s awesome that we have lemmy.ca. Then with federation you can go view any content in the world.
That being said I understand the need for “larger” instances that are more generalized and for bigger conversations.
Exactly my thoughts too. I don’t really have one unique thing I do online, I like to dabble in a bunch of things. So joining instance about a specific thing doesn’t make the most sense for me, even though I still can access the rest of the fediverse.
If Lemmy users congregate on n instances where n>1, then that’s n-1 more instances than Reddit has, so it’s still a win.
I’m brand new to this and haven’t really looked at the technical side, so this is just speculation, but I thought someone was talking about people being able to migrate accounts to different servers. Is that right?
If so, I wonder if that 99% won’t start to dilute out across the servers as people learn the tech and get more comfortable. Smaller niche communities should form naturally over time.
This is still so new for most folks, they’re gonna want it to be as easy as possible at first.
This is still so new for most folks, they’re gonna want it to be as easy as possible at first.
Email uses the same general federation. 😛 Ex Gmail, Hotmail, yahoo
migrate accounts to different servers. Is that right
There’s talk about it for Lemmy and matrix/element iirc, but it’s implemented in neither
Email uses the same general federation. 😛 Ex Gmail, Hotmail, yahoo
I’m not talking about the backend. Average users care about the user experience.
IMO it’s less of an issue with Lemmy, at least from my personal perspective (assuming that implementations and infra can scale).
On Mastodon I am on a large instance for a single reason: to get a good feed for my hashtag follows. On Lemmy if I am understanding of the federation model right I should be able to see all posts from a given community as long as I subscribe to it regardless of what instance I am on. It should be easier to switch to different instances too since we don’t have to worry about individual followers.
One bad scenario I can imagine is that the centralized instance hosting the majority of users and popular communities refuses to federate with anyone. I am kinda hoping that the community wouldn’t go along with that.
Well, while i agree that we do not want a few servers to get overly large its still more decentralized than reddit
I don’t think this is necessarily a problem. People who’d rather just be on a big platform and not worry about federation and open source and the technical aspects can do so by joining a big instance, and have pretty much the same experience they’d have on any centralized platform. People who’d rather have more understanding of and control over their experience of the federated network can host their own instance, or join a smaller instance belonging to someone with similar ideas as them, and can still interact with the larger communities by federating with them. As long as the big instances like lemmy.ml continue federating with the smaller instances like mine, I’m happy.
I think it would be fantastic if people who migrated to lemmy were comfortable choosing an instance and spreading out to different places and keeping things very decentralized. But realistically I think that most people are not interested in making those kinds of choices, and just want to go to a webpage, sign up, and start browsing memes with as few clicks and as few choices as possible.
As another commenter has mentioned, though, adding account migration would probably help a lot. Then people can make a choice without feeling locked in, or go the least-resistance route initially but still make a choice later on without losing all of their account history.
In addition to account migration, account backup would a nice peace of mind. As I understand, when the majority of federated servers shutdown, there’s a substantial amount of notice for users to migrate elsewhere - but I think it would be helpful if there was a safeguard against an admin getting bored of hosting or a failed update ruining things. I think it would also be a compelling addition of servers could peer to automatically serve as a fallback instance in the event a user’s primary goes offline. No idea how that would work, but that would help ease many folks anxiety about joining very small or niche instances.
Ease of use is certainly a consideration, but even if users are willing to do some legwork, the larger servers are going to be appealing based on the perception that they are less likely to go offline. While the opposite is probably true in the short term (the larger servers are more likely to get overloaded during the initial growth) it’s not a terrible indicator of them being well established.
One question I had, if I do want to start an account with another server or spin up my own locally, do I have to use a new unique username or would the same one work across servers?
Usernames are unique per server, like with email. I think I have an old @[email protected] account while now I’m using @[email protected].
Ah, I see. Local users don’t display the host (at least not on beehaw), that makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
I’m a fediverse newb, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter much. You can subscribe/view other instances Communities, so you still can reach out to those smaller instances. Or you can use a smaller instance as your logon/home instance and subscribe to communities in larger instances, which is what I’ve done.
If the mods in your home instance become difficult, you can always create a new account elsewhere yet still participate in those other communities. We’re used to gravitating to the largest of a new platform for survival purposes on the internet. The federation concept makes that obsolete.
