Is Lemmy.world centralization worth fighting against?

Probably a very polarizing question.

On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.

On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance

History of LW controversial decisions

when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from !news@lemmy.world , it's still in !politics@lemmy.world )
when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )

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72 comments

It's a big problem all across the fediverse. New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they've heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or "vanilla". Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.
This leads to the biggest server becoming a runaway train, which is bad for diversity and also bad for the admins because it makes it harder to manage the load. It's the same thing with mastodon.social.
I would encourage users to avoid the biggest instance as a rule, no matter which service they are signing up for. Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.
The problem is, there aren't a lot of "general purpose" Lemmy instances. Someone following my advice, who doesn't know better, might find themselves on hexbear, dbzer0, or lemmygrad. These are bad choices for a new user who expects something more or less equivalent to major centralized sites.
- The problem is, there aren’t a lot of “general purpose” Lemmy instances.
  Or there aren't enough specific ones. If you go to Join Lemmy and you are presented with a number of general purpose instances, you are likely to pick the largest and only later realise the problems that entails and switch to another instance.
  If you are a Trekkie or read books or game or program then it is easy to pick one. Ditto if there is an instance specific to your country (I should know).
  If you look at Mastodon (which is more developed and has a wider and deeper selection of instances) you can see that these niches instances do well and I think we need to encourage more here.
  
  Can confirm that when choosing a Mastodon account, .social wasn't taking new users at the time. So I looked at the list and chose vmst.io because "Oh, I'm a nerd too."
  I'll say that while the number of connections is far lower, so far I haven't noticed that as a problem in the limited capacity that I use Mastodon.
  
  Thanks!
- Indeed.
  Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.
  That's probably good for Mastodon, but for Lemmy there isn't so much choice. My rule of thumb, in order is
  lemm.ee
  sh.itjust.works if you are ok with the name
  discuss.tchncs.de or lemmy.ca depending if you are located in Europe or North America
  lemmy.zip as they are good contenders, but a bit smaller than the others
  
  Any reasons for choosing discuss.tchncs.de over feddit.de?
  Edit: Oh wait, is feddit.de down? Have they been having issues recently?
  
  Now you understand 😄
  They have a strange issue with their frontend, the instance is still running, and can be accessed using other front ends, but as you can see, not the best experience for a new joiner
- New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they’ve heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or “vanilla”. Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.
  It's a little less the case with Lemmy and other less popular fediverse stuff, but isn't a large number of vague/general purpose instances a contributor to this? In other words, wouldn't more focused instances help reduce this problem?
  A big benefit of federation shines with topic-focused instances in that it ensures an already curated local feed to your main interest (or interests), meanwhile remaining able to connect with and discuss more general interest stuff via home and federated feeds.
  
  Something to that, for sure. The only problem is if the choices are overwhelming. People like choice when it's immediately comprehensible and meaningful, and hate it with a vengeance when it's not. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
  Mastodon is already pretty good about this with the official app and nevertheless, the most common complaint I heard during the Twitter exodus was that signing up for Mastodon was too complicated. Lemmy is far worse in this regard. The closest thing to an "official" Lemmy app doesn't even have "Lemmy" in the name, and doesn't pop up on the first screen of results in Google Play.
  
  Definitely, but I guess the amount of sysadmins wanting to operate a lemmy instance is limited. Add to that the CSAM and other nasty stuff that happened at the beginning, and only a few people would be okay to manage their own instance.
  Also, even a topic-focused instance would suffer from the lack of population. How many interesting topic can you find for a population of 50k? That can't be too precise, because you are talking to a very small population. Well, I guess that's why db0 and slrpnk are doing well, piracy and solarpunk are popular among Lemmy users (as well as whatever the political stance of lemmy.ml is)

72 comments