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.
It sounds like you are describing new user experience.
And I understand, coming from Reddit, how this can be a shock.
However, that’s how Lemmy works.
Similar to how twitter users got a shock moving (or trying to move) to mastadon.The very nature of the fediverse works better with more instances, where a single instance has fewer users and the communities are more focussed.
Beehaw hasn’t “blacklisted everyone from…”. They’ve defederated. Whilst it may seem similar, it’s more nuanced. And that’s what a lot of people don’t understand.
Block-listing all users from lemmy.world from interacting with beehaw would be an amazing ability. That would put beehaw in a read-only state for users on lemmy.world, whilst still allowing beehaw users access to lemmy.world.
Unfortunately, the current admin/mod tools do not allow for that. And manually dealing with the huge influx of toxic users (posting death threats, illegal porn or trolling) was taking too much time.Besides, the lemmy.world admin is working on custom tooling to deal with this issue. Because it is their users causing this issue, and it is their problem. And there is no higher authority - there are no Reddit admins to say “stop brigading”.
Shitjustworks, last I heard, weren’t responding to communication.
I have no doubts that beehaw will refederate as soon as Lemmy.world sorts their mod issues, or the Lemmy framework allows for more nuanced mod tools.You have to remember that Lemmy is young.
It’s been around for a few years, but the shear scale of what is happening now is less than 2 weeks oldIt’s unfortunate if the sh.itjust.works folks aren’t speaking, their listed rules seem pretty reasonable and the problem users appear to be breaking the rules of that instance too.
We have talked with them and will work with other instances to push for better moderation tool. We have nothing against individual people or their communities. Let’s keep that in mind.
This copy-and-pasted reply doesn’t actually address what I was talking about.
The people who have a problem here aren’t lemmy.world, it’s beehaw. So while it’s understandably polite for lemmy.world to moderate themselves, ultimately the tools you’re going to need will be on beehaw’s side, because even if lemmy.world does everything you could possibly desire there’s going to be many other instances that allow open subscription in the future and you can’t expect them all to do your policing for you.
This message was not copy-pasted nor was it addressed to you, I’m kinda confused why you think that.
But yes, beehaw needs moderations tools - we are working with other instances so that Lemmy - for everyone - can have better tools.
Also, we don’t expect other instances to do policing for us, this is why we want better federation options so that people using Beehaw can interact with the outside but those that do not cultivate a culture that matches with what we want would not be able to interact on Beehaw.
Very weird, there appears to be a bug in kbin. I’m seeing your “We have talked with them…” comment as a response to dozens of different comments here, including one that I made, and now when I look through the thread my response to your comment is replicated in all those dozens of places as well. My apologies, that would explain why your response seemed like such a non-sequitur to me. I’ll see if I can file a bug report about this.
Edit: here’s the bug report.
Edit 2: I missed a duplicate bug report that was already filed for this issue
Thank you for filing the bug report - that is really weird… I hope kbin fixes that issue quickly because that’s definitely gonna lead to some very off interpretations.
Block-listing all users from lemmy.world from interacting with beehaw would be an amazing ability. That would put beehaw in a read-only state for users on lemmy.world, whilst still allowing beehaw users access to lemmy.world. Unfortunately, the current admin/mod tools do not allow for that.
…
Besides, the lemmy.world admin is working on custom tooling to deal with this issue. Because it is their users causing this issue, and it is their problem.
It seems to me that calling this “lemmy.world’s problem” and expecting them to be the ones to solve it is disingenuous. You yourself say that you could “solve” it with your own custom tooling. Why not work on adding the ability to block users from a specific other instance on your instance, if that would be an amazing ability? Why is it only lemmy.world that has to do work to solve the problem?
Other instances also allow open signups, and there will no doubt be more of them in the future.
I think what they’re trying to say here is that lemmy.world is a site with a community and they’ve got a problem of having a toxic community that’s abusing another community. THAT is their problem and they need to fix it through moderation. Until then, other communities will do what they need to do to limit the damage caused by the users of their community. It’s not solely up to Lemmy.world to create the tools to fix their issue but it is their responsibility to moderate effectively, just like every other community has that responsibility and they have an incentive to work on the tools to make that job easier for themselves but also for all of the communities in the fediverse.
You misunderstand. I was making the case that for me personally, the fediverse works better if there are few central node instances that are not particularly focused. I get that this is controversial, but I make the case for it anyways.
For example, I would rather have all the largest technology, gaming, and selfhosting communities be in one or two instances rather than having to x-post to 5 technology or gaming communities across numerous instances.
The second part is only speculation, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyways.
I mean… that’s on you, then. Historically, that’s not how the Fediverse has worked, and it likely will continue to not work that way. Things could always change, considering the Twitter exodus and now the Reddit exodus, but the way most Fediverse services are set up seems to encourage smaller communities rather than large, centralized ones. Plus, if you have centralized ones, what happens if admins go rogue? What if the servers go down? What if, what if, what if? With decentralization, you avoid so many issues that come with having those large, centralized instances. Of course, there are downsides, but if you want something centralized, maybe try something like Tildes?
Twitter is a extremely good fit for ActivityPub as there you are following users, while in Lemmy you primarily follow communities whose strength is determined by number. !technology on beehaw is better than !technology on an instance of 10 people.
By centralized, I mean to be in the 1-4 large instances on Lemmy that people flock to from smaller instances. Right now, the design of the Fediverse encourages former Redditors to join the biggest instances. Discovery tools might spread out the users and make solo instances more viable, but the activity may still be concentrated in the same few instances.
Every instance has the potential to be standalone like Tildes by defederating from everybody else once they hit critical mass. Like Truth Social on Mastodon. Or Kbin before it Federated.
I think we just need better discovery and aggregation. If everyone is looking at an aggregation of “/technology” from every federated instance then there’s no reason to flock to large instances.
Isn’t there a big danger of advertising and influence moving in if you have a handful of centralized servers?
Sock puppet accounts to influence the conversation don’t make economic sense when the people you are influencing number in the thousands. They do when you are in the millions.
Paying a server admin for influence or a hand on the scale makes no sense if that server has thousands of users mostly subscribed to your handful of communities on your handful of large instances.
Yes, the user experience is easier, but I think it opens things up to community attack scenarios that a wider federation of of servers with a wide distribution of popular communities makes more difficult.
And to be clear, I don’t mean attack as in taking systems offline. I mean attack as in moneyed interests doing the type of thing moneyed interest does on all popular social media. Things that I believe make the user experience worse.
My fear is that your desire for centralization to make the user experience easier creates a system that makes the user experience worse in a way that makes it much more difficult to fight.
I’m very out of the loop here, what’s going on with beehaw and lemmy.world?
I’ll be honest, the federation thing is very confusing for new users. I have set up my own instance and have pulled a few instances into it (I think that’s the correct terminology), but I still don’t quite understand it all.
One thing I do find frustrating, is most of the content that shows up is from 1 instance (beehaw) and 1 community in that instance (Technology).
I found a few things I’m interested in and added communities to my instance, but all that seems to show up is the one instance and one community. It kind of seems to defeat the purpose. I should have just joined beehaw and stuck with whatever communities they have. Which again, seems to defeat the whole point.
I’m technical enough to set up my own instance on my own server (with a few other federated items on it) but this in particular has proven frustrating. I’m sure someone will come along and tell me I’m doing it wrong, but that’s the point. It shouldn’t be this frustrating or confusing if it wants to succeed.
In fact, I had to log into Beehaw to comment here, as attempting to comment from my instance, just times out.
Thank you for that
There seems to be a lot of FUD going around with the defederation news. The problem, as most problems seem to currently be, is the population is exploding and the tooling isn’t there to support the real growth in numbers. Beehaw has been a community for quite a while, and they were just here first so have more established communities, you can’t blame them for that. They have every right to defederate instances, especially when their main concern is being able to moderate content for their users. Each instance serves their users first, other instances lack of user moderation shouldn’t be their problem. They said they’ll open back up once they can manage the moderation work load.
As for the fragmentation, this is really how lemmy was designed to be. There is talks of adding federated community listings and community browsers to lemmy itself to support discovery. Really, these features just weren’t needed a couple weeks ago and now they are. In my opinion, the larger communities should have communities on multiple instances. You can cross-post across instance communities as well. Hopefully in the future the fragmentation can be fixed via the use of tags and other possible organizational tools that help federation but keeps things decentralized.
The established instances have dominance due to the first-mover advantage, which is causing the centralization at present. Overall, the experience is going to be different to a lot of reddit users due to the very nature of decentralizing things. I feel confident solutions will be found for most of these issues, and make the federated experience easier to navigate while still supporting the decentralized nature. But the fact is, this isn’t and never will be "reddit’ as it was, which was a centralized system with a single authority (the ToS and admins).
Absolutely. I don’t think it’s really sunk in generally that the Fediverse is intended to operate fundamentally differently from a centralized system. An instance selectively (de)federating is how it’s supposed to work.
If the platform running as intended kills it, then there are big problems. I don’t think it will, but the user culture does have to change and incorporate knowledge of how the system works. We need to not have threads saying the Fediverse, a platform built on decentralization, needs to centralize as much as possible to survive.
Yep. Threads like this boil down to “Lemmy isn’t the perfect Reddit replacement I want. We need to change things so it will be as close to Reddit as possible.”
Look, I migrated to Reddit from Digg. Reddit wasn’t exactly like Digg. I actually found it nicer. A new user on Reddit a month ago would not have had the same experience I had a decade ago. The default subreddits are different. The types of posts are different. The popular posts are different. The comment sections are very different.
I’ve stayed on Reddit until the kerfuffle, but I doubt I’d ever decide to join if I first found it as a new user today.
The de-federation that beehaw just put in place listed, in part, the desire to keep the comment sections from devolving into current Reddit comment sections. And, as many others have pointed out, it was a reluctant move because of a limit of moderation resources and tools.
I joined the fediverse last week as one of many Reddit refugees. I joined sh.itjust.works because at the time it was a smaller instance and the large ones were overloaded. The de-federation didn’t make me happy, largely for the selfish reason that the more interesting communities I was subscribed to were on beehaw.
The goal of the de-federation did make me happy. I want quality content and engaged and engaging comments. I subscribed here, but also kept my sh.itjust.works account.
I’m not particularly concerned about a split acccount history. I have hopes that Lemmy and the fediverse will make it successfully through the growing pains this unexpected influx of new users will cause. I’m certain this isn’t going to be the only growing pain event, nor do I think it will be the most painful.
I think the way Lemmy federation works is kinda perfect and I feel like things will mostly sort themselves out after a while. Like, I can foresee large and small islands of federated servers, and while that might not seem good at first, I think it can work.
For example, I might have two Fediverse users, one I use in the “mainstream” island, and another I use in not-mainstream servers that has more controversial topics. A kid might have a user in a kids appropriate island where there is no federation with servers containing adult content.
Maybe a Lemmy client can then combine content from my two users, so I can view content from the mainstream and my alt servers together.
I think the issue that beehaw had was one of insufficient moderation tooling. Very solvable, and the admins even say that, but they also said they can’t stand around waiting for mod tools to become available, so they’re using the tool they have for the time being. If Lemmy catches on, I’m sure these issues will be solved in due time.
Exactly. They recognize that defederation is the nuclear option, but it’s the only effective tool they have at the moment.
Beehaw is big on the “safe space” approach, rather than “grow” approach. So makes sense they did what they did.
In their defense, I remember a lot of people bouncing off voat specifically because it was full of trolls, racists, and generally horrible people. We don’t want that happening here, too.
Its a fine line between “safe space” and “too space so no content”. I think Beehaw has managed to achieve that
What moderation tooling do they need? Never did any Reddit modding myself but might be down for making some tools if someone gave me a rundown of what’s needed
Unfortunately, I’m not really equipped to answer your question, but in sure if you reached out to behaws admins they’d point you in the right direction
Anything besides manually checking each post/comment and defederating an entire instance would help.
Hard disagree. Centralization is what enables rich dickheads to seize control of what ought to be the commons. Dispersing the community into many small nodes that communicate with each other is the safeguard against that happening. Ideally it shouldn’t matter which node you call home.
Exactly. Reddit was dominated by small groups of controlling mods.
Decentralization means freedom to try something better.
OP is not saying centralization is good, just that it appears to be inevitable even on the fediverse. They suggested this centralization could kill the project altogether. You misread their point.
Smh people downvoting OP because they can’t read.
Also, the title of the post is “the lemmy experience is better when centralized” so maybe if you’re gonna call out reading comprehension, try a little of it yourself. Smh indeed.
Well maybe if you read past the title you would be following the conversation better
So the title and the content of the post are inconsistent, and you’re gonna put that on me? Cool cool cool.
Downvoting… on an instance that disables downvotes? Neat trick.
That’s definitely an ideal benefit of decentralization, but as the OP correctly pointed out, the reality often works out differently than the ideal.
Exactly! I believe that once Rexxit is over, a big part of those that stay and have joined the big instances will naturally migrate to smaller instances with rules and philosophies that match their own.
Gross blech gross yuck. No, please god no. I’m subscribed to communities from loads of instances. The whole point of federated applications is that no one really has control over the whole.
People who have been engaged in an authoritarian system for so long that they “can’t see the forest for the trees” are lost when they experience anything else. They are driven to recreate the centralized authority, because it is life as they know it.
Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other.
I think it’s clear Beehaw isn’t working to be, or wanting to be, a replacement for Reddit at all.
There seems to be quite a few folks here that basically want the Lemmyverse to be Reddit with new management
That’s fine, they can try? Just as anyone else can have different goals and pursue them.
I really like this openness of the fediverse in arguments like these. We don’t have to agree, it’s alright.
This commentary wasn’t particularly targeted at beehaw. I was just saying that I don’t see the appeal of generalized mega-instances going away.
You did post this on the biggest community on Beehaw after all, haha. It’s to be expected that some people will think you’re talking about us.
Fair. Discovery is easier on a big instance, but you get a lot more control on a smaller one.
This is exactly what happened with the early waves of mastodon migration; a whole load of instances suddenly had to up their game, there was defederation all over, and tooling had to improve to handle mod needs in larger communities. We’ll get there, it’ll stabilise. In the meantime, fund your server and thank your mods :)
I don’t want an experience similar to Reddit though. I want a small active community with shared values and a variety of subjects.
Idk. I’m conflicted on this. While I agree… For bigger/broader topics, I can definitely see that the quality of discussion and the repetition of topic is already really bad for smaller/niche communities.
When the subreddit had maybe 2k subs worldwide, and now is comprised of 50 subs spread across 3 instances… It’s rough. That community is just dead and that sucks.
I guess I’d rather have one centralized community on one big (yet open source) instance where I know we can leave and move again, than have the community just die entirely
Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit
Beehaw has been it’s own thing for a couple years now. It has never wanted to be Reddit. They have done such a good job of curating their instance with excellent communities and membership that the Rexxitors want to join it and make it into THEIR replacement for Reddit.
And this is why I didn’t sign up for a large instance.
I’d rather join a smaller one that doesn’t block any instance, neither is it blocked by other instances.
I just want to slowly find new communites and join the ones I think have good discussion, regardless of where they are hosted. I don’t need babysitting.
Spinning up your own solves all these issues. That’s not for everyone, myself included thus far, but ultimately, no one is going to build, maintain and host exactly what I want for free forever. That’s an unreasonable expectation in any context.
That’s true.
I’m not that invested into Lemmy yet. But if I end up using it as much as reddit, I might do this (sounds like an interesting project anyway).
For now, I’ll keep my account in a smaller / more open instance.
If anything, I think reddit was a good lesson on what happens when you let a small group of people control such a large platform. We might run into the same issues if we get a couple of instances get too large.
The first sentence of your last graf makes “might” do some really heavy lifting in the second.
I think we’ll see a full spectrum of how people use Lemmy, and I suspect in the long run, self-selection on each instance is going to make federation make a far more understandable concept to people with any curiosity about it, and if everyone else wants Reddit, hey, more power to them.
You already see a lot of people congregating in the top Mastodon instances.
People might not understand that they can still communicate with the larger instances (or they might feel like it’s a “safer bet” to join the larger ones). Anyway, by the time they understand, they are not gonna create a new account in another instance.
I have so far found that explaining it as being like email (defederation aside) is not helpful.
I would disagree.
What happens when everyone flocks to beehaw, or lemmy.world- Is those instances end up going pretty slowly.
People from other instances can still read, can still post, and can comment. This, for example, is popping up on my newsfeed.
A post, on beehaw, written by a user on monero.town, being read by a user on lemmyworld.com.
Also, when beehaw defederated with lemmy.world, that is no bueno too.
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.
So if I’m interested in many topics I have to create an account on every singles instance?
That’s not how Lemmy works. You just need an account on ONE instance. And then subscribe to all the communities that interest you, some may be local to your instance and some may be hosted on other instances.
Why would I join an instance about music for example to end up subscribing to communities that have nothing to do with music?
Of the themed instances that exist now, I’d be willing to bet that in addition to their local communities they host that they also subscribe to other communities that aren’t strictly related to whatever theme they are going with.
For example, I’m sure the Star Trek instance also subscribes to the lemmy@lemmy.ml community so the admin can stay abreast of Lemmy news. And probably also follows other technology related communities as well.
I think most people would just want to gravitate to whatever they want to be identified with. There’s nothing stopping you from joining a music themed instance and then adding some non-music subscriptions to your list. It doesn’t force those subs on anyone else on the instance.
And if you don’t want to be identified with any specific topic or community, you can always join a general Lemmy instance like Beehaw or Lemmy.world and subscribe to whatever you like piecemeal.
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, goes about their way, and maybe you get a chance encounter. 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.
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.
Communities have moderators too.
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?
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 programming@programming.dev 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.
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.
This kind of stuff follows Zipf’s Law so it’s 100% expected that there will be 3-4 instances aggregating the largest amounts of traffic, but instances smaller than that will constantly shift around and grow, organically, rather than be compounded and corralled artificially by one platform. In other words, this is just statistics playing out and we’re nowhere near the end.
“Zipfian distribution”… I learned something new today. Cool concept, thanks for sharing!
Beehaw only defederated from Lemmy.world because of the currently limited moderation tools in the software. This is not going to be a problem forever.
I hope people can find communities both on large instances (Beehaw, Lemmy.world) as well on as very small niche instances. Discoverability is a bit a problem but I think over time we will find communities we like, and participate in them. What instance they are hosted on is not all that important.
I’m on kbin and I have to say I like what they are doing better than Lemmy as far as ease of use and UI. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
I agree. I have both lemmy and kbin accounts, and so far I think the new user experience on kbin is just a little bit easier. But I’ll keep my eye on lemmy in the meantime. You’re right, it will be very interesting to see how this thing develops.
The best chance of succeeding is federation across both. The user base on both is already small, there’s no need for this us-vs-them mentality.
I don’t think so : in mastodon, people knows they can federate. After trial and error process, they choose their instance based on reliability, moderation and the topics inside.
I think lemmy/kbin will follow the same path.
