To support decentralization and spread, should lemmy.world close registration at some point to prevent a performance overload due to too many users? Of course, if registration is disabled, there could be a hint placed somewhere near that from other instances you can interact with content on lemmy.world just like you had registered on it. There could be a link to join-lemmys instance overview.
nope, that would make the experience way worse with federation not working well with communities. like for example I’ve made a community over on lemmy.world and it has a couple of members and a few posts in it, but I can’t see it from any other lemmy instances I’ve tried (unless it doesn’t work if you’re not logged in). you can kinda make kbin see it but to make posts appear you have to search for them and if you search for them before you search for the community, they appear in a random magazine and then when the magazine for that community is created the posts that were put in random stay there and never return… so yeah…
I get the point, but that limits the users’ right to select which community they want to join. I feel that is more important than preemptive decentralization of content. Hopefully there is a way to migrate communities from one instance to another. Should an instance get too large that would be a good feature to mitigate risk.
I’m not a lemmy.world user (so I have no dog in this debate) but I’m gonna disagree. I’m of the opinion that signups for an instance should stay open as long as the admins can afford/handle the growth. I think it’s unfair to force the admins to keep it open if they aren’t able to handle it which is the crux of what OP is asking.
Besides, it’s not like those users cant just federate with all the communities of lemmy.world they want. And I bet there won’t be a dearth of choices for decent instances if the demand calls for it. Lemmy.ml closed signups despite being the big instance and lemmy.world emerged as an alternative. So why wouldn’t something similar happen if lemmy.world did the same?
I do think there should be a hard limit to the number of total users in an instance. Otherwise as you said the content will get centralised in a specific instance. But that limit should be much higher than what lemmy.world now has. Also closing new registration at this time would be detrimental to the overall ecosystem. This is just my personal opinion.
Having the user count far exceed what the servers can handle is also detrimental to the ecosystem.
People aren’t patient. And the current instability we’re seeing will just make people give up on Lemmy after a brief attempt to settle in.
You raise a valid point. But finding new communities is much harder in smaller instances. So there is a chance the user will not find content they are interested in.
Isn’t the intent of federation, however, that every instance should have access to every community? So even those small instances be able to access the same communities.
Not seeing something means you’ve intentionally defederarated them (or maybe they’ve defederarated you?)
Or a server is dying somewhere.
