this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Lemmy isn't hugged to death. The issue is that everyone is just heading to the same handful of instances.
I didn’t realize this until I started self-hosting my own instance, but if you don’t join one of the 3 large instances (beehaw, world, ml) then you miss out on a LOT of historical content. The way federation works is that it only pulls in new post/comments after someone on your instance subscribes to a community on another instance. So if you find a cool new community on another instance, you can subscribe to see any new posts and comments, but you won’t see any of the old content at all unless you manually search for the post/comment.
Long winded way of saying, the best user experience (content wise) is always going to be on the largest instances unless Lemmy/ActivityPub changes how content backfilling works.
Maybe they should update the join-lemmy.org page to suggest joining smaller instances. They put popular instances at the top and presumably that’s what everyone wants to join.
Yes, that's most likely the cause.
Here's the current usershare breakdown by instance, if anyone's curious:
Source: https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/tree/main/frontend/public/data
Lemmy.world is getting a very big chunk, but other than that it actually seems fairly distributed.
I guess there has to be a lowest common denominator instance. Not at all a bad thing, it leaves the dedicated communities out of their inevitable implosion range which still having access.
Why don't instances create user caps (at least temporarily) to help spread the load? Seems wild to have unlimited sign-ups when instances max out typical hardware at a couple thousand users.
Really everyone always wants to be on the most popular "site" instance to ensure it will just not go away suddenly. After that they go for ones that give them a cool @ domain name. This is how email and Jabber/XMPP worked for years. Modern fediverse should be using some form of modern distributed identity, not 1965 email style identities.
Yes, I figured. My domain name is not as cool as "shitjustworks" or whatever. But I can say that my instance is gonna stay for as long as Lemmy as software is supported, no matter if there are many users or not. I strongly believe that FOSS and the Fediverse are the future and I want to give something to the community by hosting the instance.
I went through the evolution of email.. At first it was universities, then ISPs etc. Having your identity tied to them SUCKED every time you no longer qualified for an account, changed providers ETC. I was a hotmail user before Microsoft purchased it, and an early beta Gmail user.. While this is some centralisation these itentied have lasted decades, where AT THE TIME AOL was the (this is the biggest, never going away) option. Now almost no one has an @AOL.com address.
Point being that no matter the current promise your instance could DIE if you get ill or can't afford to host it etc. The model is BAD. I have said it before and will say it again, Identity SHOULD NOT be tied to instances, AND it needs some form of bot and trust system built in.
Except unlike email, it is not a big deal to change accounts on lemmy, almost all interation happens in communites not user to user.
It matters if you create a community and are the only mod, or are a mod etc etc. You basically lose that if you lose your identity .
I partially agree with you. But my plan is to hand over the entire thing should I fall ill or get tired of hosting and maintaining it.
But in the end, everything's gonna go away. Even Reddit, like all the platforms before it. That's just the way things work.
What would be better, though? Having a P2P-like system where everything is truly federated? Like... Everyone has all accounts and all content at all times? I don't know how this would work.
At this point in time, there are clear advantages to the current federated system, but there are also clear disadvantes, like what you're describing, as well as some other things, like the different rules and moderation techniques of instances, defederation, etc.
undefined> What would be better, though? Having a P2P-like system where everything is truly federated? Like… Everyone has all accounts and all content at all times? I don’t know how this would work
I think something mandatory in the server instances that runs a blockchain (not crypto to be clear but that is how it works) IE every instance server is a validator node. When you create an account you do it from an instance, it gets recorded into the blockchain but at that point you have a lemmy account. You can directly log in on any instance as YOU (kind of like how SAML/OAUTH lets you use a google / microsoft / steam account) and use the services. When you post it is signed with your blockchain info. You could get banned on a specific instance and that gets recorded in the block chain. Other instances could chose to look at that info and decide they don't want users that have been banned on multiple other instances or on specific trusted instances. Over time your account essentially becomes more or less trusted but the key think is that your YOU and not bound to one instance.