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What is the point of small instances? (lemm.ee)

submitted 11 months ago by gicagaf805@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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They come and go. They're random clutter. We only need a few big instances that hosts a majority of the communities and that's it. Why do we need so many smaller ones?

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[-] bogdugg@sh.itjust.works 18 points 11 months ago

I think you've correctly identified a problem, but misidentified the solution.

It's true that there are many redundant communities of which everyone would be better served if there were an easy way to group them together. The solution, however, is not to reduce the number of instances, but rather to provide more tools for instances to group communities together. You want communities to be spread across many instances because this maximizes user control - it's kind of the entire point? But of course, the lack of grouping makes it very difficult to try to centralize discussion, which is important for the community to grow. This service is still a work in progress, so these kinds of things - I hope - will come in time, as both the technology and culture develops.

tl;dr: centralized control bad, centralized discussion good, the current system does a bad job of reconciling these two positions

[-] testing@kbin.social 2 points 11 months ago

@bogdugg

The solution, however, is not to reduce the number of instances, but rather to provide more tools for instances to group communities together.

kbin collections are grouping together communities, but unfortunately, collections themselves do not federate
@gicagaf805

[-] wjrii@kbin.social 2 points 11 months ago

Seems like what a lot of people want is a hybrid of Usenet and Reddit, but what we have is more like a bunch of reddits that are willing to talk to each other. Certainly better for governance and redundancy and as a kind of organic load balancing in a cash-poor ecosystem, but the "killer app" would be (optional?) persistence of communities outside of instances.

this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023

-17 points (29.3% liked)

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