Yeah, we need to spread out a little more. Fediverse is not about having centralized concentrations that can be targetted.
Ideally every minor Instance could have one major community located there, that could serve as the central space for that particular community. That’s pretty impossible of course, but it paints the picture.
I’m running a small instance, thelemmy.club
We even have built in Voyager/WefWef at app.thelemmy.club :P
I don’t advertise is too often as I’m not trying to get huge, we have about 120 users and have been up a month. But we have plenty of resources to grow a little.
Mine is sorta like this, it’s pretty quiet but then also happens to have the biggest Steam Deck community.
It’s also got the biggest community covering the Russo-Ukrainian war: [email protected]
It has a few niche communities. [email protected] was the first community on your server that I subscribed to.
Anarchychess was the reason I joined sopuli.xyz, before I understood how the Fediverse worked.
All of reddit could burn, but I needed my en passant fix.
Tinfoil hat theory: OG Lemmyheads are attacking the big centralized communities and taking them down in order to force all the new users to spread amongst the smaller instances like we’re supposed to, preventing inevitable corporate control of the ActivityPub platform
I doubt that’s anywhere close to the truth but I choose to believe it, crusty old hackers pulling the plug on their children for our own good
As possible as anything else, but it would be unusual. I find it strange that people are so eager to reach for unusual explanations when the actual, conventional extremist trolls absolutely exist. This would be 100% in-character for them, and would benefit their goals very clearly.
Occam’s Razor.
Additionally, they would try to point the finger at absolutely everyone except for them, as that would clearly serve their goals of general misinformation and distrust.
To be totally clear, they literally said it’s a tinfoil theory. To me that implies they’re just wildly speculating.
That sounds like a good way to make people go back to Reddit
Why can’t we have community tags for grouping? Like have a “tag” you can subscribe to that encompasses all “meme” communities, or “politics”, etc. Then if something goes down people can default to whatever. Maybe you could even make it so if you wanted to post you could post it into tag and the tag decides based off metrics which community to actually post it in? Idk, maybe I am dumb. But that seems cool.
That’s actually not a bad idea. It’d be cool to have communities, community tags, and post tags. You could choose to sort by whichever you want. You could go to a community, or you could just look at the “solarpunk” tag if you want, similar to Twitter I guess.
For communities, I feel like a good solution would be to let mods link similar communities from different instances together, sorta like an automatic cross post.
We are kind of doing that now over at [email protected]
Sidebar links to our related communities is the best we can do right now.
Ideally every minor Instance could have one major community located there, that could serve as the central space for that particular community. That’s pretty impossible of course, but it paints the picture.
You could probably do that if you had a centralised coordinator who could assi… I’ll see myself out.
Part of the problem is discoverability. If people don’t use my instance, they rarely know we have independent communities like [email protected]. Some, like [email protected] are really shadowed by larger versions where some sort of multi community subscription could help a lot.
I think part of the solution is to normalize the idea that you subscribe to all the communities on a topic you’re interested in, even if they’re small, so wherever something gets posted, you see it. Eventually some of those communities may be closed in favor of the more active ones, but as a subscriber, there’s no opportunity cost.
I feel like we’re seeing the inherent flaws of the fediverse here in some aspects. A completely democratic spread or spread in general of communities doesn’t seem like it’s going to work. Real people and infrastructure are behind making sure instances with communities that serve large amounts of user requests stay up and operable. Infrastructure costs people and money, and people with right skills and fundraising skills are not evenly distributed.
If an instance touts itself to be a mega-instance, that’s one thing. Lemmy is still a confusing place to understand if I should create my own community or join one. Some communities and instances have a lot more % active users and moderators than others.
People are also lazy. Hosting your own instance is “easy” until you have a popular community, or handful of popular communities. Unless you treat it like a job, not a whole lot of people are interested in spending time figuring out fundraising and dev ops to ensure their community can deal with future user growth.
Money, talent, and physical infrastructure aren’t evenly and fairly available. So it makes it difficult to produce a federated universe that doesn’t reflect these things.
Can’t expect new users to go down the rabbit hole of trying to understand what instance they should make an account on. All instances will grow over time and we are seeing a lot of unevenness because of factors stated above. Instances will surely balance out as time goes on, so I think whoever is prematurely attacking large instances—whether they are doing so for fediverse axiom related issues or not—is making fundamental mistakes of fediverse theory.
Like the anchor tenant of a shopping mall.
Or every major community should exist on at least 3 instances for redundancy.
Or re-architect more like Usenet/nntp where (I think) each node would have its own copy of everything.
I highly recommend spreading out and creating accounts on other instances. Whenever one instance has issues or something, I just use another. That’s the strength of the fediverse.
Plus, you might find (or create) some cool local posts, which helps spread out content.
Mastodon account also works as a backup since you can subscribe to communities and post comments from there.
Are there any reasons for/against using the same username across different instances?
Depends on whether you are trying to reduce the likelihood of people tracking you across instances (for example, if one account is for porn). If you just want duplicate accounts on which you’ll do the same things, I don’t see why it would be a problem to use the same name.
@ciapatri @Holodeck_Moriarty anonymity/self-branding
truly tragic, communities should have never centralised on the top instances.
Centralization is natural, even in the fediverse. A successful lemmy is going to look like tens of large instances, a few hundred medium instances, and a ton of tiny and irrelevant instances. Even if federation and discovery get more transparent it’s still likely going to be mostly centralized.
Owners of larger instances should freeze people making new accounts and point them to a site that can list other instances maybe for periods of time. There should be some sort of pledge amongst instance owners to help the fediverse where they aren’t hard rules but things to try and do
A block like this would have probably kept me from making an account here, and I’m an IT tech.
(I tried to create my user on Fedd.it, but it simply wouldn’t let me. I tried 10x. So I’m on lemmy.world because here, it worked.) We don’t need anything that makes entering the Fediverse harder.
There’s only one person to blame for the sudden explosion of users of a new and undeveloped system. I see this all as a good thing to happen in the beginning, as it will help improve and solidify solutions now, rather than years later when things are more established. There will be shuffling and mirroring of communities, and tools made to help in that cause, and all of that will make the overall fediverse better.
When I’m sorting by all, instead of local or subscribed communities/magazines, everything I see comes from lemmy.world. It looks like Kbin/Sopuli/Beehaw are just a desert, until you sort by local and, aleluyah, there is updated content.
aleluyah
hallelujah?
Probably, but I’m not sure, those words are very strange to me in English.
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Well you’re doing better than most English speakers, and you got the word close enough to understand what you were saying. It’s a strange word in english anyway
/c/boneappletea
I guess I’m lucky to be on lemmy.ca, but it’s concerning that a lot of the popular stuff is located on two servers. What’s the point of the fediverse, then?
The posted content is almost all backed up elsewhere, iirc. My understanding is that the risk is less having a huge amount of content being generated on specific servers than it is having a lot of users concentrated on those servers. Restoring data from backup or migrating communities (from a content perspective, as in, rehosting) is a lot easier than having people locked out, or, worse, losing accounts altogether.
Yeah, after what happened to VLemmy I decided to start my own instance, that way as long as I maintain it I know for a fact that it won’t just go down.
I keep seeing Vlemmy mentioned but I guess I missed the drama. Did the server admin unexpectedly shut the server down?
Pretty much, just vanished off the face of the earth. Donation links got shut down too. I’ve seen some discussions alleging there was an incident with law enforcement (A user uploaded “japanese underage child” content to the server, which was illegal in vlemmy’s juristiction - ireland IIRC?) and shortly after that the server disappeared
Basically. There was no announcement and no one’s really sure what happened, the server kinda just died one day and the admin never said anything about it.
Would be nice to have some form of account portability that would work after a server vanishes. Like, way to register a pubkey on a server and then register a signed message at another server that this is your new account.
That would be very nice, though how it would be implemented would be difficult. One way it could potentially be done is the new server has to request control from the old one, that would be fairly secure but would introduce the problem of “What if the old one no longer exists?” It could be that there’s a key that you send with your activity to verify it’s you which can be moved to a new instance, but then you run into the issue of how to stop a malicious instance admin from getting your info. You could have a centralized authentication service, though many dislike that because it goes against federation to some extent. I know on Mastadon you can transition your followers, I don’t know how it works but it’s possible they figured out a good solution.
I transitioned between Mastodon servers. I needed access to both accounts to transition to the new account.
Was a budding smaller instance and then suddenly without warning it disappeared. I’m not sure if we know what happened, but it’s actually one of the reasons why I want to stay on the bigger instances. Smaller ones have the risk of just poofing away one day…whereas larger ones may have occasional downtime and issues, your account is less likely to be unexpectedly lost to the void.
What happened to vlemmy?
spread out and no problem
From a user interaction POV, just have a couple of accounts. I started out on a small server, got a .world and kbin account, then got a beehaw account. If a server is down, I just switch instances.
From a community standpoint, it’s terrible because the instance hosts the only live version of the communities. IMHO communities shouldn’t be instance specific. Every (federated) instance should have a two-way aggregation of identically named communities. That has some (minor) drawbacks, but is much better for new users to understand and is much more resilient to individual instance failures and outages. (/rant.off)
While other instances are down, sh.itjust.works
Except when sh.itjust.works went down later too lol
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No idea, but I don’t think it’s scheduled.
There’s a discussion here (but it’s on a lemmy.world post so probably not getting federated across instances): https://sh.itjust.works/post/1208498
It’s a DDoS attack, according to the admins in Matrix.
/u/spez has too much free time
I had to jump on my Kbin. I should probably create a 3rd account just as another backup.
Alright so I’m pretty dumb when it comes to this stuff…I’m on the shit works instance, so does that mean I can see all the stuff on the others when I go too ALL or are the all different?
So basically you have the instance you are looking at. That instance has a list of communities (from any instance) that it knows about. A new community is added whenever somebody on that instance views or subscribes to that community for the first time.
When you go to ALL on that instance, it will show only posts from those communities (which are listed in the Communities/ALL tab). So larger instances (which know about more communities) will tend to have more stuff in ALL.
There is also the issue of defederating, where the instance decides to block other instances, and communities from those instances will not show up in ALL.
So ALL is a bit misleading since it doesn’t show posts from all communities on the Lemmyverse, but only ones that the instance knows about and chooses to federate with. However, a lot of the large servers will probably be pretty similar content-wise (except for ones like Beehaw that defederated from other large instances for various reasons).
I believe there’s a tool someone made that will have your instance pre-seed itself with other communities so they show up in all regardless of user subscription. Can’t find it atm
Short answer: yeah.
Long answer: Instances federate with each other by default. Sometimes an instance defederates from a particular other instance, usually for good reasons (and oftentimes you’re not missing out on valuable stuff). Your instance hosts your account and stuff you post, but connects you to stuff hosted on other instances as well. If some instance goes down, noone can access stuff posted from that instance (like users, posts etc.)
I understand why there are many servers, but why is there no central single sign on for many servers? Same with syncing community’s over instances.
I’m new so not sure why or why not.
It’s the same reason there isn’t a central email sign on. Different people control different servers. They’re all just using the same protocol so they are interoperable. Just like your email, you have an address that points to your particular account on your particular provider. [email protected]. It’s essentially the same thing as email, just a different form of interaction.
oauth does exist, I think some fedi platforms do support it even.
Oversimplification ahead.
Oauth is a solution when single provider offers many services.
Lemmy is a single service offered by many providers.
While you can work around some of that, that is still the essence of the “problem”.
That was an excellent EIL5
So that instance admins can maintain more control over who can use their instance. I think it might be a modding nightmare otherwise.
Honestly I think such a decentralized distributed type website should exist, but moderation would be very difficult and it’d be like some kind of dark web 4chan
Kbin go brrrr
And this is why i think forums are a much better fit for the matrix protocol, it really doesn’t make much sense to use activitypub for this.
This right here. The primary benefit of the matrix protocol would be that a community would keep on chugging as any particular instances go up and down. There would be no “home” instance that goes down and takes the community with it.
This choice is going to see some communities get really big, but then the “home” instance goes belly-up, or makes some, ahem “management decisions” that really hurt the community, and they are going to have to painfully jump ship again and again.
The downside would be higher resource demands for instance owners -but that’s a problem that will get better over time, instead of worse.
The resource issue also isn’t really that big of a deal, i’ve managed to keep up with tons of big chat rooms with messages every second on my OLD matrix server, and it’s been refined since then.
I’m on Lemmy.world and everything seems fine? I’m so confused.
It was back online a few hours ago. It was down in the morning hours US time.
Same here! Don’t know what they’re talking about.
Seems like they’re back up!
They were both down earlier.
