I just realized that none of the comments or posts I made in the last week from my instance are getting to lemmy.world.
I went to see if I my instance was defederated. No, still showing as connected.
I then went to see if I got blocked or banned. Nope, my username is not showing up in the modlog anywhere.
Is it because my instance is small? I guess not, because I can interact with people and communities from anywhere else just fine.
At the moment, the only plausible explanation I have is that lemmy.world is overwhelmed and dropping messages from smaller instances. They do however everything in their power to keep more users coming up.
Yeah, I get that they were being attacked. I can only imagine that getting DDOS’d is not fun, and worrying about the Schmoes on the smaller instances is not a top concern.
But even in the middle of these constant outages and attacks, the lemmy.world admins are still keeping registrations open? Why? Wouldn’t it be better if they encouraged the users to move out of the instance to reduce the load? Isn’t the whole point of decentralized technologies to be, you know, decentralized?
I shouldn’t have to come here, create an account and make things even more centralized just so that I can tell people that this attitude is hurting the fediverse.
I wouldn’t be so pissed at this if it weren’t for the fact that some many communities were created here and is making this particular instance a crucial part of the fediverse, but the admins seems to be more worried about getting their user count up than the health of the overall system.
Please, admins, the more you go with this unstable federation and open registrations, the more of an incentive you are creating to centralize this further here. Help the fediverse and help yourselves. Close down registrations and focus on ensuring that everyone can access the communities that are being formed here.
A general thought about centralisation on the fediverse …
Across various platforms, relatively large instances appear to be a common, arguably “natural” phenomenon. mastodon.social, firefish.social, kbin.social, lemmy.world, pixelfed.social etc (see the fedidb page for platforms for data).
So, without judging it as inherently good or bad for the fediverse, it might be worth understanding why/how this comes to be. In that vein, my immediate thoughts:
- Decentralisation isn’t naturally attractive and has obvious flaws. It’s off-putting if you don’t understand what’s going on, raises questions that hard to get answers to such as “how are the admins of that instance” and “what problems will I face that I’m not being told about”, and generally introduces decisions and information that get in the way of starting an account and jumping in to the platform.
- Network effects are real and would naturally lead to run away centralisation.
- People seek “trust-worthiness” (related to the first point), and amidst uncertainty about which instance to pick, the obvious, and maybe only clear signal of trustworthiness is the size of an instance.
- In the case of lemmy, the location of communities adds an extra dimension, which, given that you need an account on an instance to create a community there, contributes an additional centralising factor.
If excessive centralisation is to be avoided, whatever the threshold is, I’d bet accounting for these factors (and whatever others are in play) would be necessary. Some random thoughts along these lines:
- Large central instances could do more to promote instance diversity. I’ve seen ruud say that lemmy.world will be doing something along those lines shortly (stated on mastodon).
- Smaller instances could do more to clearly state why and how their instance is attractive. How invested are the admins into maintaining the instance long term, what’s their moderation/(de-)federation policy, do they have a team of some sort, who are they generally on some sort of personal level etc.
- join-lemmy and bigger instances could do more to surface the above information about other instances.
- The lemmy community (or any other fediverse community) could do more to establish norms about what is expected of instances, admins and communicating where instances and admins are in terms of these norms.
- I see open source licences as a good model. Basically, various “pacts” get written up over time, which are statements of values and commitments that admins and users enter into when they run or join an instance. Various instances adopt particular (or various) pacts which made clear to all new members.
- A bit more adventurous … I’m wondering if “community only” and “user only” instances might make sense at all?
- No idea if the division of load here would actually help anything, but I’m curious.
- One issue would be how do users create communities on a “community-only” instance, and I figure the easiest way through that is allow users to sign in to the instance with their credentials from “user only” instances. A bit of software work would be required, but it’s been done on the fediverse before.
Beyond all of that, it might be worth considering the benefits of a relatively big “central” instance. Namely, AFAIU, that they test the limits of the software, which is useful for future growth, they can probably muster larger moderation teams, though such often has scaling issues, and, to be fair, provide the easy landing spot for newcomers who don’t know how (or why) to pick an instance.
A bit more adventurous … I’m wondering if “community only” and “user only” instances might make sense at all?
I suggested this in another thread. However I’ve come to see an issue with that idea. The users.
It’s very hard to change the URL of an instance for federation purposes. All the existing posts and comments that exist everywhere will reference the original URLs.
My suggestion was to move the user side to a new URL. But, the problem there is that lemmy.world is one of the main instances that are suggested to potential fediverse denizens. I suppose the user based URLs could redirect to a new lemmy user only instance keeping the original federating.
It would make some difference in terms of load because the one central point both federation and user activity is going to hit is the SQL server. The user side would be just one more instance pulling data from the federating site. And all user activity would hit the new dedicated DB. There’s still going to be an upper limit without moving toward clustered SQL servers and the like.
I think there’s a real problem with advertising the fediverse on places like reddit. Because, in one post you’ll never properly explain the fediverse. It’s a bit like the Matrix. You need to see it for yourself. As such, what would seem like the sensible thing to do (point people to fedidb or the observer one) will likely confuse people initially. Pointing them to lemmy.world or kbin.social makes sense for this reason, get engaged and understand later. So, I’m not sure how the long term solution to this goes.
Just spitballing an idea I haven’t fully thought out: One interesting way to avoid excessive centralization may be to display a “Join lemmy” button to logged-out users, more prominent than the “Register” button, which redirects to join-lemmy.org/instances instead of the instance registration page. Though I agree with your point about join-lemmy in its current form being somewhat underwhelming as an onboarder. In addition to what you mentioned it could do with some filters (For language, at a minimum) and sorting (For instance age, size). Even adding a button that basically says “I understand the instance I pick isn’t that important, just send me to a random reliable one please” would help a lot.
In the long term I also hope Lemmy evolves to actually make the instance you’re on matter less - for example, by changing defaults on the homepage and search page to “All” instead of “Local”, showing global subscriber count instead of instance subscriber count when searching communities, adding ways to migrate accounts and communities between instances, and perhaps even adding a way to merge one instance into another if one admin no longer wants to maintain their instance, and another admin is willing to absorb them.
I feel like picking your first instance is not as important as you make it out to be here.
It’s similar to registering on a web site, and all these decisions you talk about sound like you are choosing a partner for life. Is she responsible? Will she take care of the children?
It really isn’t the end of the world if you pick a small instance and you don’t like it, I promise.
I joined vlemmy and subscribed to a bunch of communities. What communities was I subscribed to? I’ll never know because it’s down forever
So I’m going to push back against your response here pretty hard.
First, I’m not talking about myself, I’m trying to understand general user behaviour … so going ad hominem here or presuming I’m projecting my own problems isn’t productive or useful.
Second … “it isn’t that hard” is, IMO, the mantra of someone choosing not to understand the users, which can become a pretty toxic behaviour or perspective.
You state …
picking your first instance is not as important as you make it out to be here
(emphasis mine)
The pertinent questions here are:
- How is a new user supposed to know that?
- Where has such information been provided?
- How clearly and easily discoverable is that information?
- How convincing and comprehensible is that information for a newcomer?
- How much does digesting this information ultimately contribute to the load of signing up for lemmy such that it ultimately doesn’t alter the fact that picking an instance, or learning that it doesn’t matter which instance you pick, is friction that is easy to bypass by simply picking the big central instance?
If you were trying to help me … thanks … but I wasn’t talking about me … rather the generic “new user”.
And none of what you say about it being not as important doesn’t really alter the reality that the friction of decentralisation makes (re-)centralisation around a big instance the path of least resistance and therefore the common choice for many newcomers.
There are tools out to help you (at least partly) migrate your account. It won’t migrate your posts and comments but it will migrate your subscriptions.
https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
Also !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world is working on implementing this feature.
Yeah i know, I think it’s very good that it’s coming in the clients soon. Us technical folks can run command line utilities for this but probably a few users would run into issues with those.
