- 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.
What has tended to happen in the past is that an instance will grow to the limits of its moderation capacity, and then abruptly close after admin burnout or technical mismanagement hits, burning the users who trusted in being on the “biggest instance”. Some of those users will cry sour grapes and roast the Fediverse, but the network as a whole is indifferent.
A for-profit instance could go further by employing staff and monetizing, but introducing monetization makes users leave. There’s a cap on what money can do for pleasing communities, and the incentive structures inhibit them.
Users who get into ideological fights will tend to cluster together on their preferred space, making it easier to mutually block the entire instance. An admin can opt to block an instance by default, but not fully defederate. That lets friends subscribe to each other without being forced to move: the boundaries are permeable.
There was a blogpost that went around a few days ago that had some positive-sounding stats for network health/diversity. If I find it again, will link.
Sounds like we need to get used to the idea of a more fluid content network. IT always says to back up your work, soon we’ll have to make backups of our communities too.
What I dislike about this is the loss of knowledge every time an instance goes down, is there any mitigating factor for the loss of content to admin burnout, other instance enders?