LemmyWorld is a terrible place for communities to exist. Rationale:
- Lemmy World is centralized by disproportionately high user count
- Lemmy World is centralized by #Cloudflare
- Lemmy World is exclusive because Cloudflare is exclusive
It’s antithetical to the #decentralized #fediverse for one node to be positioned so centrally and revolting that it all happens on the network of a privacy-offender (CF). If #Lemmy World were to go down, a huge number of communities would go with it.
So what’s the solution?
Individual action protocol:
- Never post an original thread to #LemmyWorld. Find a free world non-Cloudflare decentralized instance to start new threads. Create a new community if needed. (there are no search tools advanced enough to have a general Cloudflare filter, but #lemmyverse.net is useful because it supports manually filtering out select nodes like LW)
- Wait for some engagement, ideally responses.
- Cross-post to the relevant Lemmy World community (if user poaching is needed).
This gets some exposure to the content while also tipping off readers of the LW community of alternative venues. LW readers are lazy pragmatists so they will naturally reply in the LW thread rather than the original thread. Hence step 2. If an LW user wants to interact with another responder they must do so on the more free venue. Step 3 can be omitted in situations where the free-world community is populated well enough. If /everything/ gets cross-posted to LW then there is no incentive for people to leave LW.
Better ideas? Would this work as a collective movement?
But here’s the problem. I don’t want to have to use 300 different Netflix apps. I don’t want to juggle 15 email boxes. I don’t want 7 different music apps. People don’t want to have to think about 100 different lemmy instances.
I’m all for federation and decentralization, but we have a human condition problem where people just want to use one thing, the best one, and nothing else.
Back in the old hotline file sharing days, you had the concept servers + trackers + clients. Servers could list themselves on many trackers at once, and be found by clients from any of them. If a tracker goes down, you can still be found by any other. I liked that concept better with regard to being decentralized, because a popular tracker or server didn’t overshadow everyone else, and a big tracker or server going down didn’t take out anyone else. It was more of a mesh with many independent nodes.
You don’t need an account for every instance you want to see content on. I mostly don’t think about different instances when I am browsing, because federated content already shows up on my feed a lot.
No I think you missed the point- to avoid the situation of a single lemmy instance going down taking everyone’s communities with it, it would force users to post their content to many different instances because posters dont self host the content.
That’s a classic problem of low-tech people using a tool that exploits their lack of tech competency. They search for “offgrid” and get !off_grid@lemmy.world instead of !offgrid@slrpnk.net. They don’t know to use lemmyverse.net to look for better matches to their community search.
Nonetheless, you’ve given no solution. The problem needs a solution. What’s the solution for individual users?
That is a problem that could potentially be solved through better federation of communities so that different communities with the same theme, ie. gaming, would show up as one with the contents synchronized between each other.
But I am no programmer and don’t know wether this would be feasible to do.
True. And indeed there are many ways to solve this in the code. The thread is more to focus on social solutions that can be taken within the confines of the software as it is.