Every network that wants to stay decentralized has to guard against anyone gaining a controlling interest.
Once an instance gets big enough, it generates a kind of gravity, attracting not just the majority of new users, but tempting everyone else. And a few years or decades down the line, we end up with a centralized service. History has shown that anyone with the capacity to be a controlling interest eventually exercises that control to serve its own ends.
I don’t know if anyone is discussing the potential problems of existing good-faith instances becoming too large, but I think we should be. A Meta controlled instance would instantaneously dwarf any existing instance and maybe the totality of all instances.
Yes, I’ve started looking for instances that I think represent the “natural home” for communities I’m interested in. For example, I was subscribed to a lemmy.world community for the go programming language. Then I discovered the programming.dev instance. They also host a go programming community, so I switched.
Then I realized that I was likely to join a bunch of communities on that instance, so I just joined the instance directly. I think that reduces the federation burden, but it also helps me manage my personal feed because now things are grouped by more general categories.
The only thing I don’t like about doing things that way is the multiple inboxes. It would be nice if the client would collect all the inboxes into one.
this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.
Every network that wants to stay decentralized has to guard against anyone gaining a controlling interest.
Once an instance gets big enough, it generates a kind of gravity, attracting not just the majority of new users, but tempting everyone else. And a few years or decades down the line, we end up with a centralized service. History has shown that anyone with the capacity to be a controlling interest eventually exercises that control to serve its own ends.
I don’t know if anyone is discussing the potential problems of existing good-faith instances becoming too large, but I think we should be. A Meta controlled instance would instantaneously dwarf any existing instance and maybe the totality of all instances.
Yeah, I’m already a little offput by how lemmy.world seems so dominant.
Yes, I’ve started looking for instances that I think represent the “natural home” for communities I’m interested in. For example, I was subscribed to a lemmy.world community for the go programming language. Then I discovered the programming.dev instance. They also host a go programming community, so I switched.
Then I realized that I was likely to join a bunch of communities on that instance, so I just joined the instance directly. I think that reduces the federation burden, but it also helps me manage my personal feed because now things are grouped by more general categories.
The only thing I don’t like about doing things that way is the multiple inboxes. It would be nice if the client would collect all the inboxes into one.
I guess browser extension would be well suited to add account-switching/aggregating. Likewise mobile apps.
The mobile client I’m using, Liftoff, does an excellent job of both account and instance switching.
this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.