The MAU of lemmy.world is ~18,600 which is a bit greater than the combined MAU of the next 7 instances (a big help here is lemm.ee which has ~7000 MAU). This is a really healthy spread of users and it means we don't lose lemmy if the biggest instance goes down.
Compare that to Mastodon, where mastodon.social has more MAU (~372,000) than the combined MAU of the next 30 instances at least (I gave up counting). Thats not healthy for the ecosystem. Though tbf the total MAU of mastodon is ~899,000 so without mastodon.social they will still have ~527,000 but it will be very spread out.
I didn’t really understand this on the way in. Is there an explanation somewhere. I found a mobile browser app and it sort of stuck me on one without me being able to select.
Awesome thanks! I will scan around for a couple weeks and then register into a new account. Being a reddifugee with the recent censorship and a big “Center for humane tech” nerd am excited to be shifting in a better direction - so will for sure be invested in server and site health.
Think of your instance you signed up as as your email provider. Using that email you can send messages to anyone else who has an email. You do not have to pick a specific email provider to use email, gmail, hotmail etc they can all talk to each other. Lemmy works in a similar way except it not limited to DMs, the instance you sign up for allows you to talk to people across all Lemmy instances and see posts from other instances. When you go to "All" on Lemmy you are seeing all posts across all instances. When you go to Local, you are only seeing your home instance.
I think the biggest instance, lemmy.world, not being operated by the Lemmy devs is also a good health indicator - on every other Fedi service I can think of, the server run by the devs is the biggest by far.
I think the distribution is fine as long as we still have nodes with good capacity. Our real issue is everyone demanding to be on the same instance because they're scared of Federation.
What I'd REALLY like to see is a Federated Resource Locator service, kinda like nameservice for a federated user.
rumba@mastodon.social is 101254684, if I move to rumba@ingrowntownail.es, I want all my followers to do that lookup and still be following me. It's great to have my settings migrate with me, but it would be bangin' to have other people linked to me to still follow me.