At least I subscribed to !memes@sopuli.xyz
Yeah, we need to spread out a little more. Fediverse is not about having centralized concentrations that can be targetted.
Ideally every minor Instance could have one major community located there, that could serve as the central space for that particular community. That’s pretty impossible of course, but it paints the picture.
Mine is sorta like this, it’s pretty quiet but then also happens to have the biggest Steam Deck community.
It’s also got the biggest community covering the Russo-Ukrainian war: !ukraine@sopuli.xyz
It has a few niche communities. !anarchychess@sopuli.xyz was the first community on your server that I subscribed to.
Tinfoil hat theory: OG Lemmyheads are attacking the big centralized communities and taking them down in order to force all the new users to spread amongst the smaller instances like we’re supposed to, preventing inevitable corporate control of the ActivityPub platform
I doubt that’s anywhere close to the truth but I choose to believe it, crusty old hackers pulling the plug on their children for our own good
As possible as anything else, but it would be unusual. I find it strange that people are so eager to reach for unusual explanations when the actual, conventional extremist trolls absolutely exist. This would be 100% in-character for them, and would benefit their goals very clearly.
Occam’s Razor.
Additionally, they would try to point the finger at absolutely everyone except for them, as that would clearly serve their goals of general misinformation and distrust.
Why can’t we have community tags for grouping? Like have a “tag” you can subscribe to that encompasses all “meme” communities, or “politics”, etc. Then if something goes down people can default to whatever. Maybe you could even make it so if you wanted to post you could post it into tag and the tag decides based off metrics which community to actually post it in? Idk, maybe I am dumb. But that seems cool.
For communities, I feel like a good solution would be to let mods link similar communities from different instances together, sorta like an automatic cross post.
We are kind of doing that now over at !visualnovels@lemmy.comfysnug.space
Sidebar links to our related communities is the best we can do right now.
Ideally every minor Instance could have one major community located there, that could serve as the central space for that particular community. That’s pretty impossible of course, but it paints the picture.
You could probably do that if you had a centralised coordinator who could assi… I’ll see myself out.
Part of the problem is discoverability. If people don’t use my instance, they rarely know we have independent communities like !todayilearned@civilloquy.com. Some, like !games@civilloquy.com are really shadowed by larger versions where some sort of multi community subscription could help a lot.
I think part of the solution is to normalize the idea that you subscribe to all the communities on a topic you’re interested in, even if they’re small, so wherever something gets posted, you see it. Eventually some of those communities may be closed in favor of the more active ones, but as a subscriber, there’s no opportunity cost.
I feel like we’re seeing the inherent flaws of the fediverse here in some aspects. A completely democratic spread or spread in general of communities doesn’t seem like it’s going to work. Real people and infrastructure are behind making sure instances with communities that serve large amounts of user requests stay up and operable. Infrastructure costs people and money, and people with right skills and fundraising skills are not evenly distributed.
If an instance touts itself to be a mega-instance, that’s one thing. Lemmy is still a confusing place to understand if I should create my own community or join one. Some communities and instances have a lot more % active users and moderators than others.
People are also lazy. Hosting your own instance is “easy” until you have a popular community, or handful of popular communities. Unless you treat it like a job, not a whole lot of people are interested in spending time figuring out fundraising and dev ops to ensure their community can deal with future user growth.
Money, talent, and physical infrastructure aren’t evenly and fairly available. So it makes it difficult to produce a federated universe that doesn’t reflect these things.
Can’t expect new users to go down the rabbit hole of trying to understand what instance they should make an account on. All instances will grow over time and we are seeing a lot of unevenness because of factors stated above. Instances will surely balance out as time goes on, so I think whoever is prematurely attacking large instances—whether they are doing so for fediverse axiom related issues or not—is making fundamental mistakes of fediverse theory.
I highly recommend spreading out and creating accounts on other instances. Whenever one instance has issues or something, I just use another. That’s the strength of the fediverse.
Plus, you might find (or create) some cool local posts, which helps spread out content.
Are there any reasons for/against using the same username across different instances?
Depends on whether you are trying to reduce the likelihood of people tracking you across instances (for example, if one account is for porn). If you just want duplicate accounts on which you’ll do the same things, I don’t see why it would be a problem to use the same name.
@ciapatri @Holodeck_Moriarty anonymity/self-branding
truly tragic, communities should have never centralised on the top instances.
Centralization is natural, even in the fediverse. A successful lemmy is going to look like tens of large instances, a few hundred medium instances, and a ton of tiny and irrelevant instances. Even if federation and discovery get more transparent it’s still likely going to be mostly centralized.
Owners of larger instances should freeze people making new accounts and point them to a site that can list other instances maybe for periods of time. There should be some sort of pledge amongst instance owners to help the fediverse where they aren’t hard rules but things to try and do
There’s only one person to blame for the sudden explosion of users of a new and undeveloped system. I see this all as a good thing to happen in the beginning, as it will help improve and solidify solutions now, rather than years later when things are more established. There will be shuffling and mirroring of communities, and tools made to help in that cause, and all of that will make the overall fediverse better.
I guess I’m lucky to be on lemmy.ca, but it’s concerning that a lot of the popular stuff is located on two servers. What’s the point of the fediverse, then?
The posted content is almost all backed up elsewhere, iirc. My understanding is that the risk is less having a huge amount of content being generated on specific servers than it is having a lot of users concentrated on those servers. Restoring data from backup or migrating communities (from a content perspective, as in, rehosting) is a lot easier than having people locked out, or, worse, losing accounts altogether.
When I’m sorting by all, instead of local or subscribed communities/magazines, everything I see comes from lemmy.world. It looks like Kbin/Sopuli/Beehaw are just a desert, until you sort by local and, aleluyah, there is updated content.
Probably, but I’m not sure, those words are very strange to me in English.
