this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Yea it's one of those awkward things I suppose, where the instance (.world) is big enough that its operational concerns are kinda at odds with where lemmy as a project is up to.
With that many users, who also kinda expect a more reddit-style experience AFAICT, a certain amount of professionalism, stability and, in effect, slowness, is expected. And that's great.
But meanwhile lemmy is a small essentially underfunded project doing its best with a small group (2 main and a few voluntary on the side), which means bugs and then bug fixes and tweaking until things work ... all of which works well over a distributed array of smaller instances so that no single node is a major let alone fatal point of failure.
And so we've got this situation now where you could be critical of how lemmy.world relates to the bug fixing and testing load on the lemmy-verse. lemmy.world is likely the best funded instance (last I checked their donations exceed their infra needs) and yet the job of testing and working through bugs is offloaded onto all of the other smaller instances while they wait until it's all been ironed out. I don't know if it's a fair critique in the end, but it certainly seems to be there and worth considering.
Interesting point.
On the other side, as LW is more cautious about updates, that might have suggested some users to switch to instances that were more up-to-date.
But indeed I agree that people should be more spread, having 25% of Lemmy on one instance is less than ideal: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
I disagree about the 25% bit. Federation as a feature is overstressed. It's very important, but it doesn't have much of an effect on the user experience.
Federation is the freedom to get away from shitty admins and mods. Federation is the opportunity to revolt.
But you don't need to be in a constant state of revolution. Just having the opportunity doesn't mean you have to use it.
To each their own. Recently, the issue with lemmy.ml defederating ani.social shows that those issues are still very present today.
what is ironic is there's a version of 19 that easily allows the transfer of all your stuff from one instance to another. upgrading could help lighten their load and not have so much overloading traffic and downtime.
Maybe? I'd fear instead that centralisation is pretty sticky without some massive failure and wouldn't expect much movement in the proportion of users on lemmy.world.
Which means, if I'm onto something with my critique, there may very well be a bit of problematic dynamic there.
It happened in August during the long DDoS attacks on LW.
I guess here it's less prevalent because the site is still accessible, and most of the users don't really follow closely the Lemmy versions.
Yea exactly. A DDoS is the sort of failure I'd imagine you need to shift people off. Not that big/central instances are completely bad. I think they help get people into the ecosystem that wouldn't otherwise ... and they turn out to be a pretty natural and constant phenomenon in the fediverse (mastodon.social is also about ~25% of masto) ... to the point that I personally start to ask questions about alternative structures which we spoke about in another thread.
Mastodon was actively pushing to be the default instance.
https://fediversereport.com/defederation/
Lemmy's community seems to be aware of the issue, and hopefully it will resolve over time.
Mastodons community is also very much aware of the issue. There are some who even call for defederstion from large instances. The main impetus being mastodons people’s concern for safety and moderation, where big instances necessarily allow much more to pass through. So while there’s more of a push from the top to make mastodon.social the flagship, from the grassroots there’s very much a push against it (I’m loosely a voice in that might self).
Lemmy.world’s push to be a big vanilla instance is not much different from what’s happening over at mastodon I’d say not least because it’s run by people running one of the big mastodon instances.
In the end I’m not sure the two spaces differ that much in their dynamics around this, notwithstanding the differences in the attitudes of the lead devs, especially given that the same result has occurred. Which is why I say it’s likely a natural phenomenon. You’ll found the distribution of instance sizes likely follows a power law which is common in nature.
That's good. I still think that having the developers pushing or not for an instance makes a different, wasn't Mastodon 40% Mastodon.social at some point?
Hmmm ... it might have been, I'm not sure. If so, not since or during the twitter migration, as my understanding there is that mastodon.social couldn't scale well and so it was up to all the other and often new instances to take on the load (similar to lemmy's story).
Since then, AFAIU, they've put their server on kubernetes so it can horizontally scale, and of course, put themselves as the default instance in the mobile app. But as user growth hasn't really continued on mastodon it's hard to tell what the dynamics are now. Having glanced at the numbers a bit over the past year my impression is that the proportion of users on mastodon.social has been slowly growing. I haven't seen any analysis though. I did some analysis early last year (https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110331433071884694) and maybe I'll repeat that soon.
Just chiming in to say they lost my donations and me as a user for federating with Threads. I'm over on feddit.de now because they're the only instance I could find defederated from Threads and the tankies.
Edit: Have to edit this comment because I'm laughing at all of the butthurt users who are downvoting me because they don't like my personal decision.
Enjoy, feddit.de is a great instance
Yeah, I plan on donating here as well. I am a little cleaned out by tuition and textbooks at the moment though..
Downvoting because this is barely relevant to the thread.
Nah, it's on topic to the comment discussing userbase and donations. I'm not alone in leaving due to Threads either.
Isn't one of the new features the ability to block instances at a user level?
It's different on other platforms (like mastodon) but on lemmy, it only blocks posts from the blocked instance. Users from Threads would still be interacting in comments with the user who blocks their instance.
Regardless, I believe they should be defederated by instance admins on ethical grounds. Meta/FB have run unethical, uninformed experiments on their users, including purposefully inducing depression in their users.
The fact that Meta has assisted in genocide should be grounds for defederation by instances which claim to protect and care about their users.
Meta's platforms have also played a key role in radicalizing users, and they purposefully marketed Threads to far-right extremists.
Here's my argument with citations
There's also good arguments to defederate and block them from the fedivers based on EEE.
If an instance's admins claim they care about protecting their users and providing a safe, healthy community but are federated with Threads, then they are either uninformed or liars.
Fair!