2y ago

Is Lemmy's growth good and what federation will look like?

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.

26 comments

I think it's fine for now, personally. More important to have the overall population on the threadiverse grow and stabilize than hemming and hawing about user distribution.
What the development "should" look like is going to be different depending on who you ask. There's naturally going to be lots of people disagreeing with me here, but here's how I hope things shake out when things calm down and we have a more consistent long-term userbase:
What I hope is that we have a good mix of communal, regional and special interest instances, and a slow decline of "generalist" instances that try and be everything to everyone.
My definitions of those 4 types are as follows:
Communal: an instance where the users predominantly share a worldview and/or social tendencies, so communication and decision-making is easier. Communities on these instances would be focused on these shared ideas.
Regional: an instance for those from the same geographic area and that speak the same language. Communities on these instances are language-specific and region-specific versions of communities from other instances and local news.
Special interest: an instance for those with the same profession, hobby and/or interests. Communities on these instances are all about the specific topic (whether programming, star trek or woodworking)
Generalist: an instance with no real identity or direction outside of being an easy place to sign up.
I think the first 3 are important to the long-term health of the threadiverse, and should be emphasized.
- Here's my spin on your model: Generalist instances will also be important to the overall health precisely because they will be the catch-all where the masses flock, keeping the other types of instances relatively clean and on topic.
  Generalists will bring in traffic and be very busy, but people who just want to troll or don't care much will remain in these types of instances, whereas those who have a need to flock as in 1, 2, 3 will jump ship accordingly. Whenever any given generalist instance becomes too overwhelming for other instances, they will be defederated, making them rise and fall at a higher rate than other instances.

Honestly, the complaining is the standard "our clubhouse" kinda vibe you get absolutely every time this happens, where a community grows rapidly from small to medium. Literally, every single time.
While I understand the complaints, its always struck me as a little silly for people to make them in a place that was clearly intended to grow large. Like reddit for instance. Or a server called lemmy.world, seems to me to be signaling a clear intention to seek to become large.
I mean, yes, the tone changes. It's going to go through several evolutions, not just one. And every one of them will bring complaints. It's just people being people, "get off my lawn" is probably a sentiment roughly as old as the animal kingdom of biology?
That said, I deeply appreciate that the Fediverse actually has a built-in solution for them. Which they of course already know, they're just removed and moaning, that's all.
Regarding community duplication, that is the system working as intended. If someone wants to combine them into one, it would not be difficult to make a program to do this.
- And regarding duplication, you can see something similar in Reddit where you end up with multiple subreddits with just sightly different naming but with the exact same purpose. I really don't see how people see that as an issue. Eventually it'll solve itself like it did in Reddit, people just join the biggest community and the rest die out.
  But multiple communities would be much better because if one goes down or gets defederated or just goes to shit the community as a whole would still exist. It just needs a separate content aggregation layer so that all content from the same communities end up in a single feed.
  
  It's more of a problem for Lemmy because federation isn't really smooth yet and there's not an easy way to just point people to the popular community. There's also the current degeneration hype, so there's constantly a risk you just lose access to certain communities, and there's no good notification that it happened.
  
  yeah, i agree the issue of multiple communities serving the same purpose is minor and i don't expect it to be an issue as time goes on.
  maybe it's not as much of an issue as i think but my concern would be if one instance has the vast sum of users would others be discouraged from defederating with it. if a benefit of being federated is being easily discoverable by users, than having the largest userbase would make federating with that instance inherently more valuable as communities would want to be found by those who would participate.
  it could be that it wouldn't be a big issue to exist away from large instances, and i'm sure many communities wouldn't need or want to seek out users through large general instances. i just wouldn't want admins of large instances to hold unequal power over smaller federated instances that would want to reach the largest userbase.

The main issue with the size of .world so far is just the technical stuff. Lemmy hasn't really been tested at this scale before so we're seeing various bugs and federation issues that have probably never been seen before either.
Personally I don't think the Beehaw thing was a problem for people outside of the walled garden, only for those in it. I had an account there but had to move off to keep access to my fave communities, whereas the ones on there I was using from my .world account all have alternatives elsewhere so that account wasn't "punished" like my Beehaw one was. This is of course a huge advantage of the community split, one instance can't arbitrarily cut off your access to a certain topic.
What I've been doing is just subbing to all communities for a given interest, and seeing how it goes. Sometimes there are different goals /atmosphere in each, or sometimes I'll just cross-post to all of them and see where folks are biting. I've already seen a couple of very niche communities start redirecting people to the bigger competitor so some amount of centralisation is just going to be natural over time.

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

Your post is a bit confusing. You seem to be using Lemmy to refer to lemmy.ml? and just .world to refer to lemmy.world? Or do you mean Lemmy as in all instances? Or Lemmy the software? Or the threadiverse in general?
- maybe i mean .ml. i was under the impression that .world and .ml were closely related but distinct instances, as opposed to kbin which is federated but not as closely related as lemmy instances. like i said, this is new to me so i'm still getting a handle on how everything exists and interacts.
  i think the core of what i'm curious about is if there is an issue if a singular instance in the 'threadiverse' gets large enough and if that has negative implications for other federated instances. if users largely centralizing in this decentralized platform detracts from the goals of federation?
- Not sure on lemmy.ml but the "dot tld" (.world) is an already established convention from Mastodon & co that refers to instances named after the software they use, with that TLD (for example, mastodon.social is frequently abbreviated to just .social, same with .online)
- I think they mean Lemmy as the place where people make posts and comment on those posts.

I'm one of the new users and I do have to say the fact that I had to jump through less hoops to sign up with .world was a big reason why I signed up there. When you're trying something new the less friction the better to acquire new users. I don't want to write an essay on why I want to get an account. I know we want to minimize bots, but there are other ways to do that than throwing unnecessary road blocks in front of users who are skeptical to join to begin with.

Fast growth is always messy. Time will tell. Other than that we of couse need to do the right things now and steer into a healthy direction. But don't expect this to happen without major hiccups. It'll settle down eventually.

Whatever it is, I like it and have no issues tbh

@caephi@lemmy.world more of a pro than a con; large instances are less likely to be defederated, for the same reason that no email provider would ever block "gmail.com".
- i think my concern comes from the idea that large instances could set the pace for how other instances operate. if admins for lemmy.world wanted to enact certain policies the fact that they have the largest userbase would encourage other instances to fall in line since they wouldn't want to defederate from the largest instance.
  i should also admit that i'm not completely aware of the process through which instances federate and defederate from each other. i assume it's up to the discretion of the admins of each instance, and then once many begin to federate together the admins of each have their say on who can be included, with defederating occuring if there is no longer alignment between an instance and it's federation. correct me if i'm wrong, but if this is correct, large instances like lemmy.world would hold an unequal share of bargaining power in these circumstances.
- And still beehaw federated lemmy.world

Until all the kinks with federated content are ironed out, I’m content with a few big instances. Hopefully we get tools to migrate communities with comments to different instances in future, so that we can break down big communities into smaller ones.

I don't know the answer to any of your questions, but the duplicate communities thing is definitely an interesting problem to have. I mean, reddit had plenty of duplicate communities as well, but they each tended to build up their own personality which I always found interesting.
For example, I subscribe to TeslaMotors and TeslaLounge on reddit (I drive a model 3) and I find them both super valuable, but they're also super different. TeslaMotors tends to be breaking news but overly positive and gets grumpy whenever you post anything remotely negative about the company or its cars. TeslaLounge is much more realistic, where people can freely talk about the things they love about their car, but also the quirks and negatives without getting flamed.

26 comments