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.
Beehive blacklisted Lemmy.world? Mhm and that’s why we need decentralised instances. I don’t care about how beehive views Lemmy world as I can access still both as I am from an entirely different instance :)
Is it difficult to find a small instance that has access to the larger instances? Are you able to post to both Beehaw and lemmy.world from the server you mention?
I’m thinking about self-hosting an instance, but I’m not clear if these bigger instances would block me because I’m some little unknown server. Would they have to manually give me access to interact (federate?) with them if I self-host?
They don’t automatically block you. Beehaw seems on the lookout of troublesome users more than other instances. When they notice a lot of those users are coming from the same instance, they just defederate it until better tools become available to moderate.
I’m still federated with both instances. I’m also the only user on my instance.
I am from feddit.de and have subscribed to communities on my home instance, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, pathfinder.social and beehive and can post and comment there to my heart’s content.
I don’t know how private/self hosted instances work
There’s still one issue that bothers me about Beehaw blacklisting lemmy.world though.
For example, if someone from lemmy.world posts to c/gaming@beehaw.org, then only other people on lemmy.world will see that post because Beehaw will not sync it for any other instances to see.
But that’s caused by the centralization of users and communities the few big instances that allow anyone to create communities. If communities were more spread out between smaller, more specialized instances, an issue with any one instance wouldn’t affect communities on other instances.
It impacts you still if you subscribe to beehaw.org communities. Their defederation means lots of other users cannot participate in these communities anymore. So there is less activity for you, even if you belong to neither the defederating nor the defederated instance.