this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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I think it is dangerous to tell everyone to go to lemmy.world. That buildup of lots of people on a single server goes against the intended use and risks introducing similar problems as Reddit has, when a single instance gets too much power. We regrettably have that problem with email servers today, where a few bad powerful actors (Gmail, Yahoo etc) with a business incentive control who is allowed to send mail or not.
It would be much healthier if they encouraged everyone to find a Lemmy instance that is either geographically close or has a local community that with common values and interests. We need to spread people out to promote democracy.
I was about to post the same. Joining the biggest instance is a bad Idea. I remember when joining Mastodon, there was a quiz that helped me find a fitting instance. Maybe there is a way to have something similar for lemmy instances? Maybe it already exists and I don't know about it? The concept of a decentralized social network seems to be hard to grasp for people.
It’s kind of a double-edged sword, though. Sure the better advice would be to join a smaller instance, or spin up your own. Most people can’t spin up their own instance. As for smaller instances, who’s to say that smaller instance ris still going to be here 1, 2, 5 years from now? The 2 largest are more likely to stick around. Not saying you’re wrong, just that there are lots of unknowns.
Personally, I don’t think Lemmy folks should be working to get people to leave Reddit. Most people I see on Lemmy love the fact that it’s a small community like Reddit used to be. Why work to destroy that? If people want to leave Reddit, Lemmy will be here, and they’re probably going to add to the community. To me the barrier to entry of understanding how lemmy/Fediverse works is kind of helping to keep the community from growing to Reddit sizes with all the annoyances that entails.
While you're not wrong per se, having a massive instance like .world has enabled some much needed stress testing of the Lemmy backend in a way that really hasn't been possible before, which will help the Devs find optimizations and improvements that will facilitate future growth overall on all instances. The recent memory leak that was discovered is a great example of it.
Really testing the limits of scalability is important for the overall future of Lemmy. Doing it on a server whose admin already runs a large mastodon server and has proven to be trustworthy and reliable is not a bad thing so long as donations can keep up with server costs.
Finally, gathering on .world makes it easy for Reddit refugees to transition, which is actually valuable in reaching critical mass on Lemmy, though maybe that first big wave of people has passed already.
I think they were saying ‘if you are an existing happy lemmy.world user and you want to join a community on another instance, do that through Lemmy.world
It’s reasonable generic advice. I’m subscribed and commenting from kbin.social
Ayooo kbin.social
I did not realize that lemmy.world is but a single instance - it's all starting to come together in my head :-)
The FAQ linked earlier in the thread suggested making an account on lemmy.world, that same thing was what I meant in my post as well. And I see the comments about it being beneficial to "stress test" the Lemmy backend, so... should I edit my original post?
One advantage lemmy.world has which led to many people recommending it early on is that Ruud is an experienced Fediverse admin (here is a summary of all his servers: https://lemmy.world/post/6441). This meant it was easy to suggest to early Reddit refugees since he's proven competent and reliable so it soothed fears of instances having poor uptime or getting abandoned and helped ease the transition.
@Coelacanth @Sati1984
I joined lemmy.world and have been really enjoying it. Still have a lot to learn, but it looks and feels like the old days of what Reddit used to be.
My main beef is with the FAQ, not your comment which just repeats what the FAQ says. But I'm concerned that bad advice from documents like that will spread through word of mouth, and become pervasive in a way that becomes difficult to retract later.
I see now, thanks! Note: If that's the case, we need an updated FAQ later down the line, when Ruud says Lemmy.world will have been properly stress-tested :-)