this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Technology

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The Lemmy User Experience is Better When Centralized into Fewer Instances (monero.town)
submitted 1 year ago by Jeknilah@monero.town to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Most people access the Fediverse through one of the large instances: lemmy.world, kbin, or beehaw. New or small instances of Lemmy have no content by default, and can most easily get content by linking to larger Lemmy instances. This is done manually one "Community" at a time (I spent 15 minutes doing this yesterday). Meanwhile, on larger instances, content naturally aggregates as a result of the sheer number of users. Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it's inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances. It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.

I actually think the Fediverse is in the beginning the process of fragmenting into siloed smaller, centralized instances. Beehaw, which is on the list of top instances, just blacklisted everyone from lemmy.world. Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other. It is possible that this fragmentation and instability? of Lemmy instances will kill the viability of Federated Reddit altogether, but hopefully not.

These are my main takeaways from my three days on the Fediverse. I will stick around to see if the Fediverse can sustain itself after the end of the Reddit blackouts.

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[–] Taubin@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm very out of the loop here, what's going on with beehaw and lemmy.world?

I'll be honest, the federation thing is very confusing for new users. I have set up my own instance and have pulled a few instances into it (I think that's the correct terminology), but I still don't quite understand it all.

One thing I do find frustrating, is most of the content that shows up is from 1 instance (beehaw) and 1 community in that instance (Technology).

I found a few things I'm interested in and added communities to my instance, but all that seems to show up is the one instance and one community. It kind of seems to defeat the purpose. I should have just joined beehaw and stuck with whatever communities they have. Which again, seems to defeat the whole point.

I'm technical enough to set up my own instance on my own server (with a few other federated items on it) but this in particular has proven frustrating. I'm sure someone will come along and tell me I'm doing it wrong, but that's the point. It shouldn't be this frustrating or confusing if it wants to succeed.

In fact, I had to log into Beehaw to comment here, as attempting to comment from my instance, just times out.