i’ve seen the sentiment that most of the growth being on lemmy with .world taking on the large share of users isn’t necessarily positive. other than the fact that the point of federation is decentralizing, what kind of issues arise from congregating heavily in a single instance?

i know even in just .world there a few redundant communities and i imagine that this is compounded in other instances. i don’t suppose i should expect or even want monolithic communities at the whim of just a few moderators or admins, but i don’t want to miss out on discussion and content for communities i’m interested in.

i guess i’m just curious what the development of communities and their interaction should look like with federation, and how browsing and engaging with these disparate but related spaces is going to work for the average user.

apologies if my questions about federation are basic or these questions are well known and understood for those who have been a part of communities like this for longer than i have.

  • @WolfhoundRO
    2•1 year ago

    I’m one of the new users and, being confused (read as “unknowledgeable”) by so many instances to sign up into, I chose .world as it looked like the most generalist and simplest with their policies. It means that, when it’s about the new users, they will need a generalist gateway to get them into the common policy part of the federation. As some servers defederalize and users get to know what they like and what servers actually suit them better to their values and policies (like Beehaw with their emphasis on the safe space), they can then create accounts on these isolated servers and go through their checks.

    Now a big suggestion for these cases would be to have some sort of federated import APIs and tools for people that want to use the same login data for the defederated servers as in the federated ones (individual federation). Example: I already have a lemmy.world account, but I want to make myself an account for the defederated Beehaw with the same login data. This way I would be able to federate-import the account from lemmy.world and then to go to Beehaw check form right away