Incredible to think about that we got it right the first time (with email) and still had to spend the last 20 years complaining about centralized social networks.
It’ll probably follow Zipf’s law, like most things.
Okay, based on that article Zipf’s law seems to mostly apply to languages. Cities, for example, don’t follow it.
Zipf’s law is just a specific example of a power law. Other power laws exist for lots of different things, just with different exponents.
the jury seems out about cities. This paper suggests they don’t follow a other distributions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275124002592 , but this one suggests that they do: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2013/12/on-city-size-distribution_g17a2442/5k3tt100wf7j-en.pdf - specifically it suggests they DO follow Zipf’s law, within a given country. Inter-country differences are likely due to different developmental trajectories over time.
It really just depends on how users have to choose a service and how much it matters. With email the service used doesn’t really matter so most either use what is given to them (here that’s often from their ISP) or what is recomended to them (e.g. Gmail or Hotmail here in the EU)
That pie chart isnt including trust.
If I see a Hotmail/yahoo email, I immediately assume spammer or nontechnical boomer who has already been scammed a few times.
That is why it’s important to also use other software than Lemmy like Mbin or Piefed. Users want choice and the Fediverse is only as decentralized as the software running on it. So please, think about this.
Also, have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active and count the number of non-LW communities in the top 20
Ironically, !fediverse@lemmy.zip could also be an alternative to this community.
@coffeeadmin@lemmy.coffee , have you considered crossposting there?
I think piefeds combined view makes this less of an issue. Like people subscribe to/post in the big communities because they are more active so get more comments and stuff. But in piefed you get the combined discussion from all the communities so you get the same experience even if you are subscribed to a less popular community on that topic.
Feeds are awesome 😎
Ex: https://piefed.social/f/fediversevideos
Allows you to sub to many fediverse account/communities/etc…
Piefed feeds do not solve technical delay between LW and aussie.zone
I dont think its the software* but the instance that matters. Everyone being on lw is not good (not that there is anything wrong with lw, just that centralization is bad). Thankfully most lemmy apps nowadays default to lemm.ee which should hopefully counter most of the centralization. Lemmy apps should rotate the default server when it gets too big which will help a lot (also shows the impact defaults have).
*Software would have mattered if the main devs instance was also the biggest. Or a very popular lemmy client defaulted to their own instance. With lemmy thats not the case.
I think a surefire way to help with this would be to have a rule that any instance that becomes the largest one on Lemmy should lock itself instantly. That way, we’ll only surpass the current max number of users on a single instance until it’s completely spread out
I would suggest giving it a smallish margin so that it wouldn’t get annoying with two similarly sized instances.
I’m not sure the smaller Lemmy servers running on a pi or resident internet upload could handle the equal sizable fraction of .world . it would be interesting to calculate how many users total on Lemmy divided by how many public joinable instances and see the averages or which servers are forced to scale the most.
This would take away complete user freedom to choose the server they want which is controversial.
I do not agree with you. Yes I’m a developer myself of Mbin. And I created Mbin. However, the problem with decentralization is that you still need to trust the developers who are building the decentralized apps. So within a decentralized ecosystem the centralized point are the developers and its project.
If you do not agree with Lemmy, you can go to Mbin. And visa versa; if you do not agree with Mbin devs, you can go to Lemmy, etc. Meaning you do need to have alternatives, otherwise choice is an illusion and decentralization is also an illusion.
~ Melroy, Mbin developer.
Big fan of mbin,
I’m sure this has been asked before, but do you plan on adding support for lemmy’s api? Lemmy really has the edge in apps.
This is a terrible distribution and the semi-centralisation and gatekeeping by the established actors is one of the reason email is dying.
I think we can do much better than that 👍
yeah its hard for an essential service to die. I will spout one of my super downvoted opinions but I think every government should be providing email service the same way they provide physical mail service. With all the rights currently given to physical mail. Im not saying as the only option and im being idealistic in thinking we can do like what we did with physical mail in this modern time. But I don’t care. Its essential and there should be a version people have that is a right and cannot go away.
I’m not sure why the USPS shouldn’t be the sole provider of email in the US.
I think every government should be providing email service the same way they provide physical mail service. With all the rights currently given to physical mail.
We’ve tried that in Germany. The De-Mail was already dead when it was born.
I think every government should be providing email service the same way they provide physical mail service
The problem with that is that email is not really secure enough for sensitive stuff like your bank account statements or your health/medicine journals from your doctor.
That is why in Denmark we don’t have the government provide actual email, but there is rather a digital mailing system where you authenticate with your digital ID and can receive secured mail from banks, municipalities, health authorities, tax authorities and others.
We should have large semi-centralized services. But they should be democratically controlled.
Do you ever think about why cities form? Rural life has a lot of appealing characteristics, plus it’s the starting state of the world. Cities form because there is an advantage to size, proximity and specialization. If we had a new planet and completely evenly distributed the population across its land, we’d very quickly form cities regardless.
It’s the same with centralized services. It takes a lot of special knowledge and equipment to run an email service. The average Lemmy user may have those resources, but even here, how many of us run our own email servers?
It costs less per person in resources to add more users after the first one. So there’s an incentive to aggregate users together. And once you have a certain number of users, maybe you figure out some way to fund your operation, and you can pay more people to add features/capabilities. Soon your entity not only has more users, it’s more appealing than a plan vanilla email service, and you get even more users. You’re doing it cheaper and better than the DIYers.
I think centralization and size are naturally occurring. We should think about ways to exist and benefit from them, so something like Gmail but run as a worker cooperative.
As someone who runs a Lemmy server I can tell you that it isn’t as simple as that.
Yes, there is an initial benefit from having more users on an instance, but this initial scaling benefit isn’t linear. It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further. Only after going over that hump it might become cheaper again at the scale of hundred-thousand of users or so, but Lemmy the software is currently also unlikely to scale as a single instance to such numbers, so it isn’t just a system operator question.
So no, unless you want to fully commercialize the Fediverse and bring in external investors to fund the getting over that initial hump, semi-centralisation is not a feasible way forward. And what would even be the point of that? Reddit exists and is basically the same.
Luckily ActivityPub is designed to scale horizontially through lots of smaller (but not tiny) instances, so I think we can manage without the above.
My argument isn’t about the fediverse specifically. It’s that centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and the lack of friction resulting from centralization can make it more competitive.
What is the reason the cost per user of hosting a Lemmy server goes up after a few thousand users? If it were say, you need more expensive hardware, that doesn’t necessarily disprove my argument. Just because a bigger investment is needed doesn’t mean it’s not cheaper per user or not more competitive. Just that you or I don’t have the capital, or that we might see centralization bad because we have bad experiences with centralized entities.
Also just because something is more competitive doesn’t mean it’s morally or aesthetically more desirable. The specialized army fed and trained by an empire overruns the brave and happy tribe of hunter gatherers.
What I’m saying is since we know the phenomenon of centralization occurs, we should try to subvert it as much as possible by introducing democratic structures.
It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further.
As a fellow Lemmy admin of a smaller instance, do you have any advice? Any resources that might be worth checking out?
