this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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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/
I also think that something like LCS or Lemmony should be recommended and/or included in the default Lemmy
docker composefile.That way, when new Lemmy servers get spun up, they will automatically get seeded with content and communities from other existing Lemmy servers.
So, matrix has the concept of aliases for channels/rooms. ActivityPub should do something similar for communities.
https://spec.matrix.org/latest/#room-aliases
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.
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.
Is it open like an instance or is it for hosting communities only?
If you're asking what the $6 gets, I'm talking about a single shard which allows me to host a Linux instance that runs a Lemmy instance. I wasn't sure if that was sufficient, but honestly, the performance via Jerboa is better than when I was using an account on lemmy.world. It has only been a week, so don't know how much disk will get used up over time. Long term I might need to bump things up for storage.
Oh, I meant would people be able to make accounts on it? Or is it purely for hosting communities?
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.
Unless there's an easy way to migrate a community to another instance, half of those will just go dark in a year or two when the admin gets bored. It's also going to make updates suck when a breaking change happens and you have a month of admins getting around to updating.
Unfortunately, Reddit and Twitter going shitty this year just reminded me that the Internet on the whole is only 30-some years old and things are still fleeting. I think it’s unreasonable to expect any one center of discussion or any particular service to be around forever.