Fediverse

We are not 'dropping' messages from smaller instances. @ruud@lemmy.world and others did tighten up some things to fend off some attacks but that should not interfere with the federation.

If you could have at least mentioned your instance name we could ask our backend administrators to have a look and we could get back to you with an informed answer.

We will not close registrations, what we will do is show people information on how the fediverse works and give them the option to register on other instances. That will be implemented in the next couple of days.

Hey, this happened to us recently. In your database check the table called 'instance ' and make sure the value for 'updated' is less than three days old for lemmy.world

There are false positives regarding the detection of "dead instances" in the latest version of Lemmy and it's actually your instance that stops sending out messages to lemmy.world

Do you have any proof of any of this? Lol this just reads like a rant that your server isn’t as popular and it isn’t fair so the popular host should just stop taking on new users because reasons

This was brought up a few days ago on ml

https://lemmy.tf/post/441333

A general thought about centralisation on the fediverse ...

Across various platforms, relatively large instances appear to be a common, arguably "natural" phenomenon. mastodon.social, firefish.social, kbin.social, lemmy.world, pixelfed.social etc (see the fedidb page for platforms for data).

So, without judging it as inherently good or bad for the fediverse, it might be worth understanding why/how this comes to be. In that vein, my immediate thoughts:

• Decentralisation isn't naturally attractive and has obvious flaws. It's off-putting if you don't understand what's going on, raises questions that hard to get answers to such as "how are the admins of that instance" and "what problems will I face that I'm not being told about", and generally introduces decisions and information that get in the way of starting an account and jumping in to the platform.
• Network effects are real and would naturally lead to run away centralisation.
• People seek "trust-worthiness" (related to the first point), and amidst uncertainty about which instance to pick, the obvious, and maybe only clear signal of trustworthiness is the size of an instance.
• In the case of lemmy, the location of communities adds an extra dimension, which, given that you need an account on an instance to create a community there, contributes an additional centralising factor.

If excessive centralisation is to be avoided, whatever the threshold is, I'd bet accounting for these factors (and whatever others are in play) would be necessary. Some random thoughts along these lines:

• Large central instances could do more to promote instance diversity. I've seen ruud say that lemmy.world will be doing something along those lines shortly (stated on mastodon).
• Smaller instances could do more to clearly state why and how their instance is attractive. How invested are the admins into maintaining the instance long term, what's their moderation/(de-)federation policy, do they have a team of some sort, who are they generally on some sort of personal level etc.
• join-lemmy and bigger instances could do more to surface the above information about other instances.
• The lemmy community (or any other fediverse community) could do more to establish norms about what is expected of instances, admins and communicating where instances and admins are in terms of these norms.
  • I see open source licences as a good model. Basically, various "pacts" get written up over time, which are statements of values and commitments that admins and users enter into when they run or join an instance. Various instances adopt particular (or various) pacts which made clear to all new members.
• A bit more adventurous ... I'm wondering if "community only" and "user only" instances might make sense at all?
  • No idea if the division of load here would actually help anything, but I'm curious.
  • One issue would be how do users create communities on a "community-only" instance, and I figure the easiest way through that is allow users to sign in to the instance with their credentials from "user only" instances. A bit of software work would be required, but it's been done on the fediverse before.

Beyond all of that, it might be worth considering the benefits of a relatively big "central" instance. Namely, AFAIU, that they test the limits of the software, which is useful for future growth, they can probably muster larger moderation teams, though such often has scaling issues, and, to be fair, provide the easy landing spot for newcomers who don't know how (or why) to pick an instance.