Technology

I mean, people will naturally flock to the biggest instances.

But if you have even 100 ACTIVE users, they'll "discover" the vast majority of communities for you, after you manually search the most popular communities.

I don't think so. I am on a smaller instance and I never use the Local tab. Just subscribe to the communities you want to see

I agree that some kind of centralization is important to a good UX, at least for an entry point – centralization reduces cognitive load as someone is trying a new service out. But I disagree that this centralization needs to be at the server level.

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.

Why wouldn’t a centralized, curated set of communities that span multiple servers work? This is basically the Lemmy Community Browser, although I think it could go one step farther to just have a button to subscribe to all of the top 50 communities.

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

Why do you think this? My understanding is that Beehaw’s defederalization was communicated to be a temporary workaround for a lack of moderation tools needed to deal with spam from large open-registration servers – not competition. (I’m taking that post in good faith, which could be wrong.) Any other signs of competition?

I mean, my first instinct was “how can I monetize this”

Reddit isn't totally free of this problem (feature) either--You can have multiple subreddits dedicated to the same topic.

IMO while the federated communities might feel fragmented if you are used to reddit, it's the main benefit of using Lemmy and something that should be embraced. Concentrating content into only a few instances defeats the point of federation.

Take the current issue as an example: A gigantic community defederated from another gigantic community leading to a comparatively large wall between the content of those communities. Had they been smaller, the impact of this issue would therefore also be smaller. This affects other communities which get content from beehaw as well, since there's now less interaction between a large portion of the fediverse user base.

It's only natural that large communities will bubble to the top however, and there probably isn't a good answer to how to 'balance out' those communities, or if that's even beneficial at all.