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lemmy.ninja

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.

  • @daniskarmaEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    That wouls be the point. But I see some issues:

    • Communications between instances are still not refined enough to be able to provide a smooth experience. Basically everytime you enter the new page of another instance you are logged out (as you do not have an account there), and discovering communities of other instances is not as smooth as it should.

    • Smaller instances give less confidence to make an account in. Smaller instances tend to mean smaller admin group, in fact maybe it’s just one person. They could leave at any time, take bad decisions for the instance (like defederation), or they can have stricter rules than you spected and ban you. The server could also be worse maintained than a bigger one.

    • People are multifaceted. People usually don’t have one interest, so a general instance seems more attractive to make an account in than smaller instances based on a interest.

    • Data and community duplication could became stupidly big very easily. Firsly the way the fediverse works many instances means that the same data is replicated in more servers. Also many instances could easily try to have the same Communities (for instances a Meme community) spliting the fanbase and potential users.

    How I see it should be. Probably the best is a few big instances. Not one, but also not a million. The ideal would probably be big regional instances, so people could join depending on where they live. But instance iteration issued should be resolved first. Then if one lf this big instances fail people could move to other of the big instances, as it would be harder for several big instances to fail at once. Also we need a way to make a Community distribution or a way to share big communities among several instances or something like that.

    And of course there’s a place for small instances. A single person or company that want an instance of their own for whatever reason. Or maybe a niche topic that could easily be handled in an instance better than in a community in another instance. But in general I think the aim for new users should be having a few well stablished generalistic instances.