- cross-posted to:
- lemmyworld
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyworld
- [email protected]
I thought the point of a fediverse was distribution making it so that no one site becomes death star sized. If one site has ALL the biggest communities… What happens if that site goes down? Shouldn’t each site that wants one have a “Tech” community, and then those get aggregated into Tech? Wouldn’t that be a better approach? Doesn’t it make more sense that no one site has so many users the server can’t handle the load (been waiting for over a week for subscriptions on lemmy.ml to complete). Before someone feels the need to explain to me what they think a federation is, I’ve taught the subject. The point I’m trying to make is… Why do we keep pretending that being the biggest is a benefit, when it is directly detrimental to the architecture that we are using? #justanotheridiot #whatdontiget #federationday
P.S. before anybody goes out of their way to be offended, my hash tags are an attempt at self deprecating humor.
It’s a delicate balance. We champion decentralization, yet there’s still this inherent gravitational pull towards a few popular instances. I guess it’s a bit like city planning in a way – people flock to where the most activity is, even if it puts a strain on that location.
In an ideal fediverse, each server would have its own thriving “Tech” community, or any other topic for that matter, and then these could all be rolled up into an aggregated view. But it seems that human nature (or perhaps the current digital culture) leads us to congregate where we see the most action.
That said, I definitely see your point about the risk of one big server going down and the subsequent fallout. That’s not an ideal situation in a decentralized model. It seems we have some evolution to go in how we utilize these systems.
You might be right about human nature, but I don’t think that the current state of lemmy is a good argument in that direction. Since there isn’t a way to aggregate multiple communities together, network effects drive users towards centrilization. It’d be interesting to see what happens if cross-instance community aggregation becomes possible.
That’s the paradox we’re grappling with in a decentralized model. If cross-instance community aggregation becomes a reality, it may help to balance things out by bringing together diverse and distributed communities. However, even then, it might not completely mitigate the tendency to gravitate towards more popular instances due to perceived value. It’s a fascinating space to watch evolve, to say the least.
I feel like it’s really just more important that not all users are on the same instance, and that not all communities are on the same instance. Sure, it would be better if there were a bunch of separate “tech” communities that aggregate together. But each of those communities need moderation.
I honestly think that we will see this over time. People will want their own version of a community and create it.