Only thing that bothers me is that most of the biggest communities are @ lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, so it still feels kind of centralized.
Obviously it's not, but I wonder if too much "power" in one instance will have some negative consequences in future. For example one of them going black results in losing half of lemmy content and orphaned users probably won't spread to smaller instances but will join next biggest.
This is true, but there are good reasons it's shaking out this way:
Lemmy.world has had some of the most open signups compared to other major instances
Discovery of communities across instances is a little harder, specifically natural discovery instead of directly searching
It is easier to just tell incoming users to sign on to the instance your community is hosted on because you know it's safe and they won't ever be locked out by defederation
I think the rise of more topic-specfiic instances like ttrpg.network will help spread the load out.
Natural discovery needs to be worked on.
just raise awareness about tools like this one https://lemmyverse.net/
Never underestimate the importance of convenience and the lack of work most people will do in most circumstances— and I'm not even blaming those people. A third-party tool will never catch on the way a built-in, organic convenience will.
Right now the process for me finding a new community is find the community, go to the search page in my browser, type in the community, search for it, wait for it to show up, and sub to it, restart my app. That sucks.
Everyone here by now knows how to find a community. Getting to that community fucking sucks.
This is a concern, but luckily this isn't required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don't need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
Maybe look into borg and https://www.borgbase.com/ - they give 10gb free. I sat it up for some important data I would want to keep if utter disaster struck yesterday, and was pretty straight forward.
You could also set up a more ghetto time machine like rsync with https://github.com/laurent22/rsync-time-backup if you have a machine on your network with ssh access from outside.
I was against it at first, but there’s probably a lot of value in communities spinning up their own domains and hosting their own focused communities. Instead of a central Lemmy.world which hosts many different communities, we should have lemmyPics.com and lemmyMusic.com and MaleFashionAdvice.com that all run Lemmy software, and then people can subscribe in from remote instances easily.
There’s still a place for general instances in this model too, but I think these communities might get off the ground easier with a $12 domain name and cloud hosting services than trying to all be the next Reddit.
Lemmy.ml is hosted by the maintainers and Lemmy.world is the biggest instance (because they were one of the few that didn’t restrict sign ups when Reddit API went dark) so those users are going to have the most communities.
Despite this I still am subbed to many communities on beehaw, Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and sh.it.just.works
And I have some subbed communities on smaller instances.
But I will say that I’m thinking of starting a new community but I’ll probably do it on Lemmy.world as they have the funds and manpower to guarantee uptime
But all the other federated instances will have an duplicate of certain posts/comments, right?
Maybe some content in cache. Not photos for sure. I'm not sure how exactly will this look like, but we can observe vlemmy.net as example, as it seems to be permanently down.
I'm kind of enjoying the smaller community size. Unlike reddit where I'd come across a post that I have something interesting to say about and see there are already 27,481 comments.
It certainly has it's ups and downs. It's nice having smaller communities as it really helps having more congenial conversations, but I do miss the larger user base sometimes, since it ensures more coverage of a given topic.
Or that topic is covered in general.
The loudest band so far seems to be the "memes" band.
Just like reddit in 2010.
Memes, racism and jailbait built reddit, but we have smartly avoided most of the latter two so far.
They aren't good too
All of them very low effort and unfunny
Or like if an A-list Hollywood actress suddenly started marketing her new summer blockbuster on a small forum of mostly tech workers.
Sure makes you think.
Guess we'll never know why Tara Reid did a reddit AMA in 2015 just to market "Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!" now.
That is good since we are all beta testing the site and developing tools to manage everything before the real migration occurs.
Real migration? Who would be migrating? The 90% we left behind?
No, thank you.
The more the merrier.
You can move to smaller universes if that's what you see fit.
Enjoy the intimate atmosphere while it last. The hordes will find us eventually.
You can always have your own universe within the fediverse.
IDK but if, say, Motörhead came to a 50 seat library in some small town it would be kinda cute and would make the library famous, and it would make all other libraries envy them in a good way.
Edit: just learned that Lemmy died 8 years ago. Just imagine I said Imagine Dragons or something...
I will imagine Imagine Dragons.
I once saw Yo-Yo Ma perform at a Borders book store in Boston.
This could be a concern but i think it will even out in the end. Many people will naturally gravitate to am instance that suites them. I created unilem.org as an instance aimed at not defederating. Some will like that and join others will not and find a different place that suits them. Its the beauty of the fediverse. You can choose your home or even host your own.
How's not defederating going so far?
Well its only a new instance but no problems so far.
Small communities and slow content feeds are fine for me I think. Either way I'm glad I'm here to witness this liminal period.
hey its like our own little MTV Unplugged session :D
allow me to introduce you to https://lemmy.world/c/tonightsdinner it's pretty much that except playing in the empty back room of the library - cooks come and post please
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !tonightsdinner@lemmy.world
Well done, robot - I'm still learning thank you!
I'm just over here waiting on more Braves fans to show up from /r/Braves. That's where I was the most active.
The trouble is the fediverse means there can be multiple. I’m subscribed to two Red Sox groups but there’s only a couple dozen people in each one so there’s no real place for GDTs yet.
As more people join one will get selected. There was r/cars and r/autos for a long time. R/cars won out in the end.
And the old memes trend is that time the band did a bunch of coffee shop shows playing nothing but ukuleles.
When Bush were at the height of their success, I saw them in a little 300 person room. It was brilliant and we should appreciate Lemmy while it is in that state.
They're just doing their part for decentralized social media.
If their fans love them enough, they'll make an account.
This is a concern, but luckily this isn't required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don't need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.
Edit: Meant to reply to the person concerned about the centralization of communities.
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy