this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023

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The Lemmy User Experience is Better When Centralized into Fewer Instances (monero.town)

submitted 1 year ago by Jeknilah@monero.town to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Most people access the Fediverse through one of the large instances: lemmy.world, kbin, or beehaw. New or small instances of Lemmy have no content by default, and can most easily get content by linking to larger Lemmy instances. This is done manually one "Community" at a time (I spent 15 minutes doing this yesterday). Meanwhile, on larger instances, content naturally aggregates as a result of the sheer number of users. Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it's inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances. It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.

I actually think the Fediverse is in the beginning the process of fragmenting into siloed smaller, centralized instances. Beehaw, which is on the list of top instances, just blacklisted everyone from lemmy.world. Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other. It is possible that this fragmentation and instability? of Lemmy instances will kill the viability of Federated Reddit altogether, but hopefully not.

These are my main takeaways from my three days on the Fediverse. I will stick around to see if the Fediverse can sustain itself after the end of the Reddit blackouts.

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[–] towerful@beehaw.org 51 points 1 year ago (6 children)

It sounds like you are describing new user experience.
And I understand, coming from Reddit, how this can be a shock.
However, that's how Lemmy works.
Similar to how twitter users got a shock moving (or trying to move) to mastadon.

The very nature of the fediverse works better with more instances, where a single instance has fewer users and the communities are more focussed.

Beehaw hasn't "blacklisted everyone from...". They've defederated. Whilst it may seem similar, it's more nuanced. And that's what a lot of people don't understand.
Block-listing all users from lemmy.world from interacting with beehaw would be an amazing ability. That would put beehaw in a read-only state for users on lemmy.world, whilst still allowing beehaw users access to lemmy.world.
Unfortunately, the current admin/mod tools do not allow for that. And manually dealing with the huge influx of toxic users (posting death threats, illegal porn or trolling) was taking too much time.

Besides, the lemmy.world admin is working on custom tooling to deal with this issue. Because it is their users causing this issue, and it is their problem. And there is no higher authority - there are no Reddit admins to say "stop brigading".
Shitjustworks, last I heard, weren't responding to communication.
I have no doubts that beehaw will refederate as soon as Lemmy.world sorts their mod issues, or the Lemmy framework allows for more nuanced mod tools.

You have to remember that Lemmy is young.
It's been around for a few years, but the shear scale of what is happening now is less than 2 weeks old

[–] JohannesOliver@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

It’s unfortunate if the sh.itjust.works folks aren’t speaking, their listed rules seem pretty reasonable and the problem users appear to be breaking the rules of that instance too.

[–] Jeknilah@monero.town 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You misunderstand. I was making the case that for me personally, the fediverse works better if there are few central node instances that are not particularly focused. I get that this is controversial, but I make the case for it anyways.

For example, I would rather have all the largest technology, gaming, and selfhosting communities be in one or two instances rather than having to x-post to 5 technology or gaming communities across numerous instances.

The second part is only speculation, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyways.

[–] miracleorange@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I mean... that's on you, then. Historically, that's not how the Fediverse has worked, and it likely will continue to not work that way. Things could always change, considering the Twitter exodus and now the Reddit exodus, but the way most Fediverse services are set up seems to encourage smaller communities rather than large, centralized ones. Plus, if you have centralized ones, what happens if admins go rogue? What if the servers go down? What if, what if, what if? With decentralization, you avoid so many issues that come with having those large, centralized instances. Of course, there are downsides, but if you want something centralized, maybe try something like Tildes?

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[–] dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There seems to be a lot of FUD going around with the defederation news. The problem, as most problems seem to currently be, is the population is exploding and the tooling isn't there to support the real growth in numbers. Beehaw has been a community for quite a while, and they were just here first so have more established communities, you can't blame them for that. They have every right to defederate instances, especially when their main concern is being able to moderate content for their users. Each instance serves their users first, other instances lack of user moderation shouldn't be their problem. They said they'll open back up once they can manage the moderation work load.

As for the fragmentation, this is really how lemmy was designed to be. There is talks of adding federated community listings and community browsers to lemmy itself to support discovery. Really, these features just weren't needed a couple weeks ago and now they are. In my opinion, the larger communities should have communities on multiple instances. You can cross-post across instance communities as well. Hopefully in the future the fragmentation can be fixed via the use of tags and other possible organizational tools that help federation but keeps things decentralized.

The established instances have dominance due to the first-mover advantage, which is causing the centralization at present. Overall, the experience is going to be different to a lot of reddit users due to the very nature of decentralizing things. I feel confident solutions will be found for most of these issues, and make the federated experience easier to navigate while still supporting the decentralized nature. But the fact is, this isn't and never will be "reddit' as it was, which was a centralized system with a single authority (the ToS and admins).

[–] yuun@lemmy.one 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Absolutely. I don't think it's really sunk in generally that the Fediverse is intended to operate fundamentally differently from a centralized system. An instance selectively (de)federating is how it's supposed to work.

If the platform running as intended kills it, then there are big problems. I don't think it will, but the user culture does have to change and incorporate knowledge of how the system works. We need to not have threads saying the Fediverse, a platform built on decentralization, needs to centralize as much as possible to survive.

[–] phase_change@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep. Threads like this boil down to “Lemmy isn’t the perfect Reddit replacement I want. We need to change things so it will be as close to Reddit as possible.”

Look, I migrated to Reddit from Digg. Reddit wasn’t exactly like Digg. I actually found it nicer. A new user on Reddit a month ago would not have had the same experience I had a decade ago. The default subreddits are different. The types of posts are different. The popular posts are different. The comment sections are very different.

I’ve stayed on Reddit until the kerfuffle, but I doubt I’d ever decide to join if I first found it as a new user today.

The de-federation that beehaw just put in place listed, in part, the desire to keep the comment sections from devolving into current Reddit comment sections. And, as many others have pointed out, it was a reluctant move because of a limit of moderation resources and tools.

I joined the fediverse last week as one of many Reddit refugees. I joined sh.itjust.works because at the time it was a smaller instance and the large ones were overloaded. The de-federation didn’t make me happy, largely for the selfish reason that the more interesting communities I was subscribed to were on beehaw.

The goal of the de-federation did make me happy. I want quality content and engaged and engaging comments. I subscribed here, but also kept my sh.itjust.works account.

I’m not particularly concerned about a split acccount history. I have hopes that Lemmy and the fediverse will make it successfully through the growing pains this unexpected influx of new users will cause. I’m certain this isn’t going to be the only growing pain event, nor do I think it will be the most painful.

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[–] Uniquitous@lemmy.one 26 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Hard disagree. Centralization is what enables rich dickheads to seize control of what ought to be the commons. Dispersing the community into many small nodes that communicate with each other is the safeguard against that happening. Ideally it shouldn't matter which node you call home.

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[–] MyFeetOwnMySoul@lemmy.ca 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I think the issue that beehaw had was one of insufficient moderation tooling. Very solvable, and the admins even say that, but they also said they can't stand around waiting for mod tools to become available, so they're using the tool they have for the time being. If Lemmy catches on, I'm sure these issues will be solved in due time.

[–] nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Beehaw is big on the "safe space" approach, rather than "grow" approach. So makes sense they did what they did.

[–] VentraSqwal@links.dartboard.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In their defense, I remember a lot of people bouncing off voat specifically because it was full of trolls, racists, and generally horrible people. We don't want that happening here, too.

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[–] eutsgueden@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Exactly. They recognize that defederation is the nuclear option, but it's the only effective tool they have at the moment.

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[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 19 points 1 year ago

I would disagree.

What happens when everyone flocks to beehaw, or lemmy.world- Is those instances end up going pretty slowly.

People from other instances can still read, can still post, and can comment. This, for example, is popping up on my newsfeed.

A post, on beehaw, written by a user on monero.town, being read by a user on lemmyworld.com.

Also, when beehaw defederated with lemmy.world, that is no bueno too.

[–] mim@lemmy.sdf.org 19 points 1 year ago

And this is why I didn't sign up for a large instance.

I'd rather joine a smaller one that doesn't block any instance, neither is it blocked by other instances.

I just want to slowly find new communites and join the ones I think have good discussion, regardless of where they are hosted. I don't need babysitting.

[–] rs5th@lemmy.scottlabs.io 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other.

I think it's clear Beehaw isn't working to be, or wanting to be, a replacement for Reddit at all.

[–] yuun@lemmy.one 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There seems to be quite a few folks here that basically want the Lemmyverse to be Reddit with new management

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[–] Floppy@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago

This is exactly what happened with the early waves of mastodon migration; a whole load of instances suddenly had to up their game, there was defederation all over, and tooling had to improve to handle mod needs in larger communities. We’ll get there, it’ll stabilise. In the meantime, fund your server and thank your mods :)

[–] tet42@ka.tet42.org 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (22 children)

Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I'd prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could - hopefully - at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There's a reason why every community shouldn't be on a single instance. It's a single point of failure.

[–] towerful@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's not a hot take.
That's where I think the threadiverse/lemmyverse/fediverse/whatever is (hopefully) going to end up.
The big instances are like browsing /r/all. The focused instances are going to be where it's at.

"Oh, rust? Yeh, you want the rust instance, or maybe the programming instance. Not here in the gardening instance"

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Very frustrating for sure, I feel like I'm constantly playing ping pong with new users.

New user doesn't understand lemmy and searches for community on service like lemmy.ml. Community doesn't exist so the spam the "Create Community" button or spam the admin for it. Admin is overworked/doesn't know/busy building the site and says "okay", meanwhile there is already a community of 100+ members on another instance.

For me, I built my instance to take some weight off of the main instances, thought "hey here's a group of communities that are pretty close knit that don't need to put pressure on the already overloaded servers", and I still get people who are posting "I made ____ community on lemmy.ml come join!" and it's like dude, ffs.

For example, I run an instance that focuses on a genre of music. Thus, I'm pretty dang open to anything even remotely open to that.

If it doesn't exist seriously you could have made it on my instance and modded it, give the central servers a break. I'm all for spreading the love but seriously, don't just make it by default on the popular instances
If it does exist, ffs just look around. At this point most communities on Reddit have something analogous here, or ther'es something similar you could post in first asking if there is one. "If /c/cyberpunk2077 doesn't exist maybe ask /c/gaming first. (and yes, cyberpunk2077 does exist)".
This is separate from if you don't like a community and you want to truly create your own. That's great, you should feel empowered to do so, but don't just spam the "Create Community" option if you haven't even tried to see if it's out there yet. At the very least, search out some instances and figure out where your best home should be. At this point it probably isn't lemmy.ml or beehaw.org.

That turned a bit more ranty than I expected.

[–] tet42@ka.tet42.org 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.

Peoples are lazy. They don't want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn't know it exists, its wonky at best.

If a user cant type "Stephen King community" in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn't exist and give up OR they are going to be hitting that "Create Community" button.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For sure, as much as I want users to be smarter... well my experience in development tells me they never will be. I literally had one user ping me on Lemmy asking how to join, I gave them pictures detailing steps. They were on mobile and gave up because "The subscribe button was in the sidebar and it was too confusing"

That's what we're up against. The extra button click was too much for some users.

Lemmy has to get more user friendly when it comes to subscribing. You're absolutely right it needs to be one search and click "subscribe". They should bring the feddit browser into lemmy really.

[–] Taxxor@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I feel you. When creating an UI you can think of thousands of possibilities which might not be clear to someone however obvious they seem and then design it in a way that couldn't possibly be misunderstood, then show it to different people who all agree that it's clearly structured and logical..... and the minute you release it you get posts from users where you ask yourself how they could even exist on their own.

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[–] luciole@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't want an experience similar to Reddit though. I want a small active community with shared values and a variety of subjects.

[–] veaviticus@lemmy.one 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Idk. I'm conflicted on this. While I agree... For bigger/broader topics, I can definitely see that the quality of discussion and the repetition of topic is already really bad for smaller/niche communities.

When the subreddit had maybe 2k subs worldwide, and now is comprised of 50 subs spread across 3 instances... It's rough. That community is just dead and that sucks.

I guess I'd rather have one centralized community on one big (yet open source) instance where I know we can leave and move again, than have the community just die entirely

[–] anji@lemmy.anji.nl 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Beehaw only defederated from Lemmy.world because of the currently limited moderation tools in the software. This is not going to be a problem forever.

I hope people can find communities both on large instances (Beehaw, Lemmy.world) as well on as very small niche instances. Discoverability is a bit a problem but I think over time we will find communities we like, and participate in them. What instance they are hosted on is not all that important.

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[–] BravoVictor@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago

I’m really diggin’ it. I was just looking through the list of subs that Lemmy has on their site and found programming.dev. Asked to join, and zero reason to go elsewhere. I can subscribe to damn near anything easily, and my instance has a pretty chill main section(not sure what you call it). Programming focused, but plenty of cat picks, wild bird pictures, random memes…

I think I’m sticking around for a while.

[–] 21trillionsats@infosec.pub 11 points 1 year ago

This isn’t “one or the other” IMO. There’s room for niche instances hyper-focused on a generalized topic like “math,” “comp sci,” “sports,” etc.

But then there should also be a massive generalized instance (hopefully 2 at least so the competition keeps admins in check) that has a little bit of everything and acts as a Reddit replacement. We can have our cake and eat it too.

[–] myself33@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

I don't think so : in mastodon, people knows they can federate. After trial and error process, they choose their instance based on reliability, moderation and the topics inside.
I think lemmy/kbin will follow the same path.

[–] TheBurningCloud@feddit.de 10 points 1 year ago

I think a lot of issues with federation can be solved with improving the code. Lemmy is still a very new product.

[–] yozul@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

I think that the Lemmy equivalents to big subreddits will be centralized around a few larger instances and they'll come to dominate the all timeline, but more niche things seem like they can crop up anywhere. My favorite subreddits were always the smaller ones anyway, so federation will be important for me.

Also, it matters that there are a few big instances instead of just one. If one goes full spez the others can take up the slack until a smaller general purpose instance can take its place. For example, if beehaw does go nuts and just keep defederating until it's completely siloed instead of this being a temporary measure until moderation is more under control, then I can just make another account somewhere else and these communities will become less important. I don't think that's likely, but it's a problem that solves itself in a federated system.

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Beehive blacklisted Lemmy.world? Mhm and that's why we need decentralised instances. I don't care about how beehive views Lemmy world as I can access still both as I am from an entirely different instance :)

[–] sanjosanjo@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is it difficult to find a small instance that has access to the larger instances? Are you able to post to both Beehaw and lemmy.world from the server you mention?

I'm thinking about self-hosting an instance, but I'm not clear if these bigger instances would block me because I'm some little unknown server. Would they have to manually give me access to interact (federate?) with them if I self-host?

[–] SmugBedBug@lemmy.iswhereits.at 4 points 1 year ago

They don't automatically block you. Beehaw seems on the lookout of troublesome users more than other instances. When they notice a lot of those users are coming from the same instance, they just defederate it until better tools become available to moderate.

I'm still federated with both instances. I'm also the only user on my instance.

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[–] BurningnnTree@lemmy.one 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If big instances are already defederating from each other then I don't see how Lemmy can grow like many of us want it to. I mean, now any new user who randomly chooses Lemmy.World as their server is going to get a much worse Lemmy experience and they won't even be aware of it. (Come to think of it, maybe I'm getting a lesser experience right now because maybe my server defederated from another big server that I'm not aware of.) This seems like a flawed system, or at least it seems like a system that isn't intended to have much user growth.

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can view exactly who your instance federates with. If the instance is public, the instances that are blocked/allowed are publicly visible. New users probably won't know what this means... but certainly could after some time/understanding. No reason you shouldn't know! So let's fix that.

https://lemmy.one/instances

Your instance chose to block the following instances:

lemmygrad.ml
asbestos.cafe
eientei.org

[–] Taxxor@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But that only helps in knowing which communities I can see, I still don't know how much I'm missing out in the comments on other communities because some of them might be from people my instance has defederated.

I noticed this today when I had a comment chain on lemmy.world that I accessed with my lemm.ee instance. That chain was >10 posts long with several different users from different instances.
When I looked into that community with my feddit.de account, I could only see the first two comments of that chain, not even my own lemm.ee comments were visible despite not being blocked by feddit.de.
It was because the third post of that chain was made by a user on an instance that is blocked by feddit.de and that lead to all following posts also missing.
So now I’m feeling like I’m possibly missing big parts of all those comment sections just because they happen to include a comment from a user somewhere early in the chain that is on an instance which is blocked by my instance.

That's the reason despite me being german I probalby won't use feddit.de anymore because, at least for the time being, lemm.ee doesn't have anyone blocked so in this specific example I can at least see everything posted on lemmy.world that isn't already blocked by lemmy.world itself(in which case I don't miss out because no one could see these posts).
While with feddit.de, browsing on lemmy.world I also won't see things blocked by feddit.de that other users browing lemmy.world could see.

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[–] TechieJamie@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

~~Maybe it should be a common practice to list larger servers that you've chosen to defederate from? Beehaw is being forthcoming about it, so at least people know what they're missing out on. And I don't think they'd have a bunch more hidden away from us. Now, if a community does this and tells no-one, that could be a genuine problem.~~ Making an account on another instance is a little annoying, but it's not that bad if you're old and accustomed to classical forums.

Edit: I didn't even notice the /instances URL on Lemmy. GG, it's already openly out there.

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All servers running lemmy are open about it... Check the very bottom of your instance page and click "Instances". In their case it's

https://lemmy.one/instances

And for you it's

https://beehaw.org/instances

[–] TechieJamie@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't notice the instances link down there. I've edited my comment.

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[–] admin@monero.town 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

I think instances need to be more focused. For example monero.town, very focused on Monero. If people are interested in other technology, sub to an instance focused on that, etc. but there is no reason to have all the communities on all the instances. I don't see how mega instances that try to replace reddit are viable in the long term, especially if they start to defederate.

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[–] manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 8 points 1 year ago

this is the way its supposed to work, reddit is a bunch of fragmented communities too, the only thing you share is a domain.

[–] tau@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it's inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances.

Two obvious reasons for joining smaller, more local instances are language and region. At least along those axes, there will naturally be decentralization.

It just doesn't make much sense to have communities on instances where most people on that instance can't participate in discussions due to the language barrier or because topics are specific and only relevant to a certain region.

There are already plenty of growing instances like that for specific regions or languages that are likely here to stay: feddit.de, lemmy.ca, midwest.social, aussie.zone, feddit.uk, feddit.it, feddit.dk, feddit.nl, lemmy.nz, feddit.cl, feddit.pt, ...

[–] rowinofwin@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

My hope is that federation will end up having a halfway setting, where content can come across but engagement is limited in some way. For example, you may see a post from lemmy.ml but you would only see comments from beehaw and the upvotes you give it will be calculated locally. This would allow content to be visible from everywhere but would keep the communities separated to some degree. Also having personal opt-in federation may work, just like with NSFW, you could on your account allow a particular instance to come through while someone else would not select that, leaving you with a fairly personalised experience.

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