They come and go. They’re random clutter. We only need a few big instances that hosts a majority of the communities and that’s it. Why do we need so many smaller ones?
1: Even big instances start out small.
2: Also having other instances besides the big ones helps prevent a monopoly over the fediverse.
3: Bigger isn't always better. Nothing wrong with a small Cozy community.
There is no monopoly if you have a dozen big instances. But if you have 1000 instances? What is the point. Can’t start a community there without it going poof the next week.
That is always a risk for small instances.
It is the same for small businesses or libraries/museums funded by donations.
Imo just because there is a risk does not mean they shouldn't do it.
The core issue here is instances disappearing, and That goes into the discussion of the structure of the fediverse right now vs. the fediverse in the future
A dozen big instances feel better now, and I personally wouldn’t make a community on a smaller instance unless I know it is likely to stay up. If it was run by an existing organization for example.
Long term though, I trust existing organizations to set up stable instances that won’t be shut down easily. If a government, school, game company etc. makes an instance it’s not likely to go down. Having lots of instances will look more normal then.
Ultimately we don’t need to do anything differently, I recommend new people join a big instance and then make a new account once they know what instance they like.
note to everyone: please don’t downvote good faith questions
OP asked a pretty reasonable open ended question. There are other people who may be thinking the same, and reading the discussions here might change their minds. Save downvoting for rule breaking / content that’s bad for the community
Would be nice to be able to backup your magazine/community, so if for example random.lemmy goes down, you can still migrate your /mini4wd elsewhere. Don't know how it could be implemented though, I'm still in the "i get it but not really" phase with the Fediverse.
I run an instance focused on the needs of trans and gender diverse folk, because big instances run by cis folk tend not to deal with transphobia as well as I would like.
Centralised instances not dealing with transphobia is why I left most other social media platforms, so you can imagine I’m keen not to just repeat that experience here
I’m a minuscule instance. That’s fine. I like that I have control over it, how it’s maintained and updated. If I want to convert it to Mbin because I like it more, I can. I know for sure it’s going to live at least as long as I’m interested in the fediverse. Nobody can take it away from me.
Big instances are expensive to run, and in a way, they’re not exactly immune to shutting down and big instances shutting down have a much bigger impact than a small one with few communities when they go poof.
I think it’s a valid thing to consider. Due to the nature of the fediverse, there will always be small instances. I guess you could say their purpose is to allow Lemmy to be decentralized.
Small instances don’t prevent Lemmy from being centralized, people don’t mind if their instance defederates from an instance with 5 people. Medium-sized instances (e.g. dbzer0) prevent wrongful defederation, because people will suddenly miss a few communities / users.
I think you’ve correctly identified a problem, but misidentified the solution.
It’s true that there are many redundant communities of which everyone would be better served if there were an easy way to group them together. The solution, however, is not to reduce the number of instances, but rather to provide more tools for instances to group communities together. You want communities to be spread across many instances because this maximizes user control - it’s kind of the entire point? But of course, the lack of grouping makes it very difficult to try to centralize discussion, which is important for the community to grow. This service is still a work in progress, so these kinds of things - I hope - will come in time, as both the technology and culture develops.
tl;dr: centralized control bad, centralized discussion good, the current system does a bad job of reconciling these two positions
Seems like what a lot of people want is a hybrid of Usenet and Reddit, but what we have is more like a bunch of reddits that are willing to talk to each other. Certainly better for governance and redundancy and as a kind of organic load balancing in a cash-poor ecosystem, but the "killer app" would be (optional?) persistence of communities outside of instances.
A lotta folks host their own instance simply to have a bit more control over what they personally see since until 0.19, only instance admins can block an entire instance. It also allows you to see metrics you can’t otherwise; such as the actual users who voted up and down on a specific post.
People say that a few large instances would be easy pickings for the profit motive, and monetizing.
There is a lot of handwringing over on mastodon about how people should not be directed to the large instances by default. And that people need to join the small instances to make sure mastodon (or fedi-verse) is not taken over by a few who want to profit off it. They mock those on large instances. They tell people they should join small instances.
But I have seen many small instances close and leave people in the lurch. I have seen a few people have to move several times.
I have seen users be abandoned and left with a broken instance that doesn’t work, and the admin nowhere to be seen.
I agree. But maybe the medium ones aren’t too bad.
Lemm.ee that you're on has 25,718 users but only 2232 are active, that's a really small number. Lemmy.world that you're posting into is number 9 with 11,500 active users, that's still super small tbf.
I hate the Reddit way of asking questions so much, tbh. It was "Reddit, we need this’, “Reddit, what should we do?” and now those people are here on Lemmy with the same ways of talking to the community.
Lemmy is very diverse and prone to hive mind. There’s no “we”, for better or worse.
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