Technology

37724 readers

554 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

coldredlight@beehaw.org

Los@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

remington@beehaw.org

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

177 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not just the difficulty, it's that the fediverse runs on reputation.

If you get a reputation for being an instance that has offensive/illegal content, you'll get defederated and your users will get a materially worse experience than the rest of the instances that are federating with each other - and it really only takes one or two things to get that reputation.

sh.itjust.works is a prime example: it didn't take an awful lot to get them down the defederation road, and I suspect most admins would want to maintain their reputation and an easy way to do it (until we get like... moderation tools) is to just gatekeep what communities show up on your instance.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Actually that problem is usually registered users going into established communities of other instances and trolling, not new communities pooping up that nobody knows about.