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.

This is the reason I made my account on lemmy.world and not one of the smaller is I feel this one is more likely to exist long term. But on the flip side if too many of us go with the same one I feel things would be centralized enough that they would be by and large the dominant instance. Hopefully as this place grows we can come to some solution via discussion.

Dont new users choose where to sign up? Are you suggesting some kind of system for distributing user accounts as they come in or something?

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.

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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.

It would definitely be ideal for bigger communities to evenly distribute between instances (at least instances hosted on powerful hardware). That would allow us to spread out the load over the network far more efficiently, and it would also give the network much more resilience against a single big instance going down.

Note that by evenly distributing, I don’t mean that we should be duplicating communities. I am a big fan of users from different instances teaming up and creating cohesive communities with a clear focus! I just think that this works even better if these strong communities are not all crammed into 1-2 major instances.

well, federation has many aspects to it, including the redundant sharing of the corpus of information. the whole lemmy federation system will likely come down to a few large (possibly some commercial) instances, many small to medium general interest instamces and an unknown number to micro to small special interest instances. the real power, IMO, is that no single entity has absolute authority over entry into the corpus. if we drive that point home, I think the self organizing properties of humans and networks takes care of the rest.

the danger or embrace, extend, extinguish/enshittify still exists, but there exists a more diverse balance to the various pressures.

I don’t have better input on this than: fedsocial is a different way forward than centsocial… we shall see and respond as best we can.