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.

  • HobbitFoot
    8•2 years ago

    Federation is going to start meaning that admins are going to have to enforce standards, and those standards haven’t been fully fleshed out.

    Beehaw has shown itself to be willing to temporarily defederate major servers due to spam issues. What makes Beehaw’s defederation so important is because Beehaw seems to host several pseudostandard subs, so losing access to Beehaw will impact the growth of servers’ user base.

    I expect that the discussions Beehaw is having with other servers is likely going to create a standard set of admin responsibilities for this federation. I don’t expect this to be the only federation as it seems like one of the rules is going to be “no Nazis”, as it should be.

    • @caephiOP
      5•2 years ago

      no nazis is big, hope we can keep that up.

      • IninewCrow
        3•2 years ago

        Like the German saying … "if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.”

        If you have a social media server with a small Nazi group freely talking and no one says or does anything about it even just existing on your server, you have a Nazi community.