In particular, it seems to me that centralization is almost a law of the universe (or at least a tendency). Lemmy may start decentralized, with dozens or hundreds of meaningfully-sized instances, but it’s easy to imagine a not-far future where most everyone has settled on just a handful of instances (or even just one).
I don’t mean to just be a pessimist here. I’m sure I’m far from the first person to wonder about this, and I’m curious whether there are ideas of how to counterbalance the tendency toward centralization.
Centralization is a byproduct of monopolism and part of how modern capitalism has programmed is to think. It’s hideously baked into the modern internet as it’s mostly post-regulation. I blame asymmetrical data links while I yell at children to get off my lawn.
New things come from open marketplaces of ideas. I’ll put myself in the optimistic category, but occasionally I have to put myself back here lol
I hope personal AI will fix all this shit somehow.
I’d imagine at some point we don’t need to interact with all sorts of UIs and websites, our personal AI assistants can just do it for us and send and receive information for us from where ever and present in whatever shape we want on our devices or through speech. That means centralization loses an advantage, doesn’t matter where my friend posted something as long as it’s authenticated, my AI can see it, push it forward to my “information desk” and present/read it to me.
I see. But I can imagine there’s an equal chance that this situation pushes everything towards centralisation because if this AI can pick it all up from anywhere, and you don’t interact with the UI directly, why bother posting something on an alternative to Twitter? Might as well post it at the same place because your friend’s AI would just show them your post and not the ecosystem you posted it in.
I think you are definitely right that there will wind up being some degree of centralization, even in the Fediverse, but I think the issue will be far less severe than the one we find ourselves in right now.
The fact of the matter is that it takes some degree of skill and willingness to devote time and resources to complete strangers in order to host a Lemmy instance, which will probably result in there only being a handful of “big” instances where the vast majority of communities are located. These instances could theoretically be bought, sold, and neglected, and potentially face the same conclusion as Reddit, bringing down whatever communities they happen to host.
However, the difference here is that some communities would be unaffected in that scenario. Suppose that Instance A were to go off the rails, taking with it for example the Lemmy equivalents of /r/gifs, /r/politics, and /r/gaming. This would suck, but at the same time other instances would be unaffected, meaning the Lemmy equivalents of like /r/news, /r/dankmemes, and /r/space could continue on. Furthermore, if the mods of those Instance A communities were aware of the possibility of the impending death of Instance A, they could form a migration plan ahead of time to another instance, and communicate this to the users ahead of time.
Compare that to where we are now, where literally every subreddit is shut down and needing to find an alternative place to land with practically no warning. I’d much prefer the federated scenario.
The interesting thing is whether there’s enough resale value in a Lemmy instance to justify the very real operational costs of it. Obviously depends a lot on how the post-blackout times go, but I share the opinion that any federation of moderation/data/etc. is a win, even if it’s perhaps more centralized than would be ideal.
I’ve thought about this too, but consider a situation where Reddit is exactly as they are right now in terms of amount of users, except imagine they were federated.
The moment they try to pull something that upsets their users, instead of causing a big hassle and leading to a massive community diaspora, users could simply switch over to another instance. They would continue using the exact same apps and interacting with the same people, but Reddit as a corporate monolith would simply fade out in favor of something better.
Honestly, I do agree that it’s likely that over time some instance will get too big for its own good, but that problem is so much easier to deal with here.
While I generally agree with you, the problem is, that we already have precedence going in other directions.
Web1 was initially very decentralised. Usenet, static websites hosted on small servers, etc.
Web2 made the internet much more accessible, but people consistently preferred well polished easy to use centralised services instead of the “slow and less UX optimised” decentralised alternatives. Even email isn’t really decentralised today as people don’t boycott (or care about) the big email providers (Microsoft, Google etc.) censoring or blacklisting mailservers outside of their walled garden.
I wish, that the people have made enough bad experiences with web2 to actually understand and care about web3 federation. If they don’t understand why this is necessary and just go from one company to another, then we’ll be doomed to repeat it all again… Let’s see.
Obviously the people already here are slightly biased. It’s a big task to get the Reddit people off and into the Fediverse! But we can do it!
Well, I guess email is one counterexample. Though we can all see its issues (spam, overzealous spam filters, complete lack of “feature development”, even though that’s probably a good thing there).
Also, another issue I’m worried about is horizontal scalability. I hope that as communities grow it won’t become cost-prohibitive to run a new instance (as it will have to mirror too much content).
Email isn’t really decentralised since a while anymore:
It’s Decentralised in the protocol, but the spirit of it’s execution isn’t…
I’m certainly aware of these issues, and wrestle with them regularly, as I still host email myself. That said, my professional stuff is also going through Outlook (my worst enemy as a self hoster, but I can’t really switch right now).
Still, I see it as a positive that with enough resources/time, you can still get into this space, evidenced by all the smaller email providers which still pop up and seem to have pretty good deliverability. It’s just still the best we’ve got. We won’t widely agree on anything better anytime soon, even in more technical circles.
