Why can't we have community tags for grouping? Like have a "tag" you can subscribe to that encompasses all "meme" communities, or "politics", etc. Then if something goes down people can default to whatever. Maybe you could even make it so if you wanted to post you could post it into tag and the tag decides based off metrics which community to actually post it in? Idk, maybe I am dumb. But that seems cool.

I'm running a small instance, thelemmy.club

We even have built in Voyager/WefWef at app.thelemmy.club :P

I don't advertise is too often as I'm not trying to get huge, we have about 120 users and have been up a month. But we have plenty of resources to grow a little.

I feel like we’re seeing the inherent flaws of the fediverse here in some aspects. A completely democratic spread or spread in general of communities doesn’t seem like it’s going to work. Real people and infrastructure are behind making sure instances with communities that serve large amounts of user requests stay up and operable. Infrastructure costs people and money, and people with right skills and fundraising skills are not evenly distributed.

If an instance touts itself to be a mega-instance, that’s one thing. Lemmy is still a confusing place to understand if I should create my own community or join one. Some communities and instances have a lot more % active users and moderators than others.

People are also lazy. Hosting your own instance is “easy” until you have a popular community, or handful of popular communities. Unless you treat it like a job, not a whole lot of people are interested in spending time figuring out fundraising and dev ops to ensure their community can deal with future user growth.

Money, talent, and physical infrastructure aren’t evenly and fairly available. So it makes it difficult to produce a federated universe that doesn’t reflect these things.

Can’t expect new users to go down the rabbit hole of trying to understand what instance they should make an account on. All instances will grow over time and we are seeing a lot of unevenness because of factors stated above. Instances will surely balance out as time goes on, so I think whoever is prematurely attacking large instances—whether they are doing so for fediverse axiom related issues or not—is making fundamental mistakes of fediverse theory.

Mine is sorta like this, it's pretty quiet but then also happens to have the biggest Steam Deck community.

Part of the problem is discoverability. If people don't use my instance, they rarely know we have independent communities like !todayilearned@civilloquy.com. Some, like !games@civilloquy.com are really shadowed by larger versions where some sort of multi community subscription could help a lot.

Tinfoil hat theory: OG Lemmyheads are attacking the big centralized communities and taking them down in order to force all the new users to spread amongst the smaller instances like we're supposed to, preventing inevitable corporate control of the ActivityPub platform

I doubt that's anywhere close to the truth but I choose to believe it, crusty old hackers pulling the plug on their children for our own good

For communities, I feel like a good solution would be to let mods link similar communities from different instances together, sorta like an automatic cross post.

Mastodon account also works as a backup since you can subscribe to communities and post comments from there.

Except when sh.itjust.works went down later too lol

https://lemmy.world/post/1604919

The posted content is almost all backed up elsewhere, iirc. My understanding is that the risk is less having a huge amount of content being generated on specific servers than it is having a lot of users concentrated on those servers. Restoring data from backup or migrating communities (from a content perspective, as in, rehosting) is a lot easier than having people locked out, or, worse, losing accounts altogether.

aleluyah

hallelujah?

Centralization is natural, even in the fediverse. A successful lemmy is going to look like tens of large instances, a few hundred medium instances, and a ton of tiny and irrelevant instances. Even if federation and discovery get more transparent it's still likely going to be mostly centralized.

So that instance admins can maintain more control over who can use their instance. I think it might be a modding nightmare otherwise.

Honestly I think such a decentralized distributed type website should exist, but moderation would be very difficult and it'd be like some kind of dark web 4chan

It's the same reason there isn't a central email sign on. Different people control different servers. They're all just using the same protocol so they are interoperable. Just like your email, you have an address that points to your particular account on your particular provider. Name@host.tld. It's essentially the same thing as email, just a different form of interaction.

This right here. The primary benefit of the matrix protocol would be that a community would keep on chugging as any particular instances go up and down. There would be no "home" instance that goes down and takes the community with it.

This choice is going to see some communities get really big, but then the "home" instance goes belly-up, or makes some, ahem "management decisions" that really hurt the community, and they are going to have to painfully jump ship again and again.

The downside would be higher resource demands for instance owners -but that's a problem that will get better over time, instead of worse.