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my own instance, but if you don’t join one of the 3 large instances (beehaw, world, ml) then you miss out on a LOT of historical content.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.
Edit: and then randomize the list of smaller instances to further distribute the load.
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.
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.
