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.
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.
If being focused on one thing is for you then by all means, go for it. I very much doubt that that’s the case for everyone, though, not everyone is comfortable saying “metal is my whole (online) life”, “crypto is my whole life”, “plush toys are my whole life”, and if that isn’t the case, well, do you join the plush toys or death metal instance?
It’s not like the universe put an upper cap on the number of communities. Instances themselves can be little villages in which everyone knows each other on a human, instead of interest, or they can be big cities in which you’re considered crazy if you greet someone on the street. Or all they do is focus on wet shaving and gladly engage with anyone else who is in need of advise or information, but not nearly as nerdy about it than them.
There’s place for all of that in the fediverse.
So if I’m interested in many topics I have to create an account on every singles instance?
The problem with that is users need to make a separate account for each instance. Imagine if you had to re-login every time you wanted to view a different subreddit. It’s a major pain.
That problem could be mitigated if you had an app that could seamlessly log in to multiple instances and display the content in one place. Credentials would be stored locally on your phone for security. Do you know if that exists, or if anyone’s working on something similar?
That’s actually not true if the instances are federated with each other. I post/subscribe to a few lemmy.nz communities despite having a beehaw account!
If the instances are federated with each other you don’t need to do that. You can access other instance’s content even while logged into your own.
From what I understand, and someone correct me if I’m wrong, you don’t need multiple accounts (unless one instance has blacklisted another). You can subscribe to a community on a different instance and be able to comment and post without creating an account on the second instance.
For example, on kbin’s search page you can search for [email protected] and subscribe. programming.dev is a completely separate instance running Lemmy with its own communities. Then you can see content from there on your subscribed page.
I agree fully with this. Centralizing all of the major communities with Beeyah is silly. And I wish the moderation rules were at the community level instead of instance level, but I understand that’s a limitation of the ActivityPub protocol (as far as I can tell).
Currently, the issue is people signing up to an instance with unvetted and unrestricted signups to troll/harass people on other instances rather than anything to do with communities.