this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Is Lemmy.world centralization worth fighting against? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Shamelessly plugging lemm.ee- it is exactly what you’re looking for when you say general purpose instance

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Any reasons for choosing discuss.tchncs.de over feddit.de?

Edit: Oh wait, is feddit.de down? Have they been having issues recently?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] Die4Ever 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

spreading out a bit would be nice, although there are some things that could help some of these issues anyways

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

From what I read on the aussie.zone thread (https://aussie.zone/post/9964509/11627914 ) they already tried a few things

The last one would be to have a proxy in Europe, but they don't want to (which I can understand)

[–] Die4Ever 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

yea but the new parallel sending feature should help them more, we'll see when it gets released

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hopefully soon!

[–] Die4Ever 2 points 2 months ago

It's already been in beta testing for a little while so probably releasing soon! Of course that's a bit of a risky change lol so I'll be waiting and see if any bugs are discovered in the weeks after release.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I think until there’s some tool or system that helps collate all the information out here, fragmentation is detrimental to growth.

If the same story is posted in multiple communities, I’m only posting the first one I come across. Sometimes that becomes the next big discussion and other times it’s lost and another community takes over.

I’m not going to copy and paste the same comment with every mirrored post.

So sometimes commenting feels like a waste of time.

Centralizing helps ensure that there’s vibrant, consistent discussion which is what Lemmy should be about.

In my mind, the fix is that all posts to the same link should just collect the discussion all in one place, regardless of which community spawned it.

There may be a ton of good reasons that isn’t happening, but until there’s some sort of fix, centralization ensures you find a discussion and can contribute meaningfully.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Hello,

Thank you for your comment.

I agree with the fact that a story of post should only exist once, as you said. I guess the remaining question is what to do where there are two communities for the same topic.

I have a good example that I just stumbled upon: [email protected] is the most active community about maps, has usually one post per day every day for the last few months. Once in a while, someone posts on [email protected], and they instantly get a lot more comments than the first community.

[email protected] is also quite active, despite not being on LW.

Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?

No. Half the point of federation is that not only communities (instances) can carry their own content but also their own culture. Posting or commenting about a soccer personality in, say, [email protected] is vastly different from doing it in, say, [email protected], even if the originating link to the discussion is the same.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Other issues experiences by Aussie.zone: https://aussie.zone/post/9964509/11627914

Thank you @[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Regarding your last point, tools like Lemmy Federate make this less of an issue.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Indeed, I use it from time to time, but from my experience, it seems like LW users tend to stay on their local feed, increasing the visibility of their local communities compared to ones from other instance

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Can't help those who won't help themselves 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Indeed, but the issue is when one third of the population is there

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

lemmy.world has middling to bad moderation.

lemmy.world also has at least a few divisive mods who are close friends of the lemmy.world admins and are known to retain their positions for that reason.

lemmy.world is by far the largest instance.

taken alone, none of these are a problem. together i find that concerning and exactly the kind of reason the fediverse was built to avoid.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Are there bad moderators on LW? Do you have examples? I feel like they're maybe a little stretched thin on trying to keep up with things, and so sometimes make snap decisions, but lemmy.ml is the only place I've actually seen moderation that I would describe as deliberately bad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I keep hearing about bad moderation, so I guess it's indeed an issue.

It is really a compromise, there is no ideal situation. Should we initiate something and ask people to leave LW due to bad moderation? That would probably be seen as unnecessary drama.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

i don’t think compounding problems imply a single compound solution.

instead, tackle each problem directly.

  • encourage account migration to combat overcentralization
  • encourage installment of more mods to combat ineffectual moderation
  • call for transparency in moderator selection to combat cronyism
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I see

encourage account migration to combat overcentralization

My gut feeling is that most of the people on LW are comfortable there, and wouldn't see the point in decentralization. That happened in the past with the removal of privacy communities, or the fact that LW is still federated with Threads, still they have 18k MAU

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

and that’s absolutely fair. i think another group though are uncomfortable and are simply unaware that they can move.

for example, i saw a conversation where some folks were expressing uncomfortability that .world is federated with .ml. someone else brought up switching to an instance that was defederated with .ml (happened to be mine, shoutout .cafe) and they were all like “yo! dope let me do that”

so it’s almost a matter of education/spreading awareness for some at least

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Updated the post with history of LW controversial decisions

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

@[email protected], I wanted to ask you about something: I posted to [email protected] in the past, but it seems that now the community isn't actively moderated, and on the other side [email protected] is getting a resurgence.

Do you think it is worth it trying to post to the lemmy.ca one, or should we go with the flow and post on the LW one to make it grow?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

We were actually checking into this recently! While the mods look inactive from the post history, there is an active mod keeping an eye on the community.

I'm planning to make more posts to [email protected], and while I'm not sure which one will be best in the long run, I want to try and see if we can grow this one.

As for the other communities, I'm planning to go through and clean up moderation sometime in the next little while :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Just an FYI, some of your links broke, seems to be because it included closing brackets as part of the URL. The 2nd and 3rd one and bottom 2, specifically

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Interesting, they work fine on the default UI, which client are you using?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Boost

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Updated!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Every time I want to post a politics article, I have to decide whether to post @lemmy.world (and exclude the Beehaw people and include the trolls and reach more people) or @beehaw.org (and exclude the World people and help the growth of a community that seems better, but reach a lot less people).

IDK what the answer is

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Hello, good to see you here!

I completely get what you mean. Beehaw creates its own kind of situation. For a long time I was hoping they would refederate with SJW and LW, especially after 0.19.X where users could block instances on their own, but I guess that's never going to happen.

It's really a shame, because people and communities on Beehaw are really valuable

[–] Die4Ever 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Why not post to both with Lemmy's cross-post feature?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, I cross post a lot, but over time I gets a bit annoying, especially when you know that today with user-level federation maybe Beehaw could consider refederating with LW and SJW

[–] Die4Ever 1 points 2 months ago

Beehaw has given up on Lemmy (Or just given up in general? They aren't taking care of what they have nor have they moved to something new).

They're still on v0.18.4 despite v0.18.5 being an extremely easy and safe update with a hotfix for an issue they were specifically complaining about. Literally takes like a couple minutes to do that update but they never did it. They're also keeping themselves open to at least 1 security issue by being on such an old version.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Hot take: No.

Lemmy.world being the "main" instance is natural, and Lemmy makes it difficult to discover new communities so it's also natural that lots of discussion would be in lemmy.world, too.

There was also still an unresolved issue where some instances can disappear and take out all their communities. Remember lemmy.film? I believe the Lemmy devs once said they want to make a system to migrate communities in case something like this happens but nobody knows when it'll get added.

I think it's a platform problem, I understand that connecting to all sorts of instances is the point of the fediverse but until it becomes more intuitive and less dangerous, I'm going to just stick with the most popular communities. Attempting to move people out of lemmy.world and into other duplicate communities will only split people more.