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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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[–] Spzi@lemmy.click 1 points 1 year ago

Why would I join an instance about music

Maybe the user feels music is an important part of their identity and likes the idea to call a music instance their home. Or any other reason, doesn't have to have any reason, especially not a reason which is compelling to others.

to end up subscribing to communities that have nothing to do with music?

Maybe the same user still has other interests besides music and likes to follow those.

Or in summary: Why not? It's possible.

For different people, different criteria will influence their choice of home instance. Some may even choose to have several home instances. Other factors might be uptime, latency, defederation status, size, local communities, rules, ...

For most people, it does not matter much what their home instance is, which is just another possible explanation for registering on a music instance and subscribing to remote, non-music communities. Like how you can register to Microsoft services with a Gmail address.