And that's exactly what's supposed to happen. Instance wars and eventual defederation and fragmentation are important moderation tools, and will progress the culture and feel of instances and regions of the Fediverse. Many instances will form federated cliques that are highly connected and have similar vibes and cultures, and some will be federated with multiple cliques, showing users a variety of cultures and situations.

If the Fediverse reaches a large enough number of people, it can support multiple independant cliques, and enable users see entire mini-universes with different communities and vibes.

There is nothing better than a good old tribe war.

The big problem is going to be when someone decides to start spamming and vote manipulating with bot populated private instances that automatically re-spawn themselves under a new name whenever they are blacklisted. Eventually, the standard will have to move to whitelisting over blacklisting, and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.

Ya there probably will be, but in the end it doesn't matter which is the beauty of this platform.

The biggest problem with lemmy and decentralization right now is that for optimal performance you need to spread out the load relatively evenly between instances. The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there) and that naturally leads to clumping on one or few instances which causes it to overload.

The way to solve it is to avoid having generic "anything goes" instances and instead have instances be focused on a specific topic. For example, have gaming instance, a personal finance/investing instance, all things home ownership and improvement instance, etc. You can have multiple communities per instance as long as they stay within the same general topic. This way users will naturally spread out by subscribing to different instances based on topics they're interested in. And that will solve the performance issue we're seeing with lemmy.world or other popular instances.

I mean, we already see small skirmishes here and there.

As long as there are more than two humans left, we'll always find something stupid to argue about

"Instance wars" sounds like the way "the consequences of my own actions" will be framed at a point.

The far right instances dripping with hate, bigotry and recycled propaganda will be in an "Instance war" with the mainstream instances talking about regular human being stuff - stuff like beans.

Grab your samurai swords, mall ninjas... and inventory your powdered eggs, theocratic fascist doomsday preppers...

The instance wars are coming for your unvaccinated, homeschooled, incel butts!

Email is federated as well, but I never saw anything I could call email instance wars. You can use whichever you want, no one really cares.

Don't we kinda already have them?

Begun, the instance wars have.

What if there was an app that let you log in to multiple lemmy accounts at once, aggregated the lot into one seamless feed, and used the relevant account for each interaction? Maybe even going as far as to automatically cross-post any submission to duplicate communities and aggregate that too.

Any good guides on all the instances?

I want to pick sides early so I can feast on the blood of those who dared choose differently.

This will likely follow a similar pattern to email, since it's starting from a very similar position.

At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person. People do that with cars, shoes, and yes, even email domains.

From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I've yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn't need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn't even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.

Once upon a time, email worked this way, too. Then came the spammers, scammers, and other bad actors, and this was deemed untenable. Nowadays, any email provider that allows anonymous signup is likely to be blocked by most of the email-using world. You won't be able to use them to sign up for other services, and you might not even have your mail accepted by other providers.

This will definitely become a problem as Lemmy becomes popular, and instance admins will need to crack down, lest they be overrun and defederated by the rest of the world.

I'm not sure what the answer is. This is a problem that has not been adequately solved, IMHO. A few bad apples spoil the bunch. That's been true since long before the Internet.

I don’t want it to be mainstream. I just want it to be Good.

Already happening. Have you heard of Beehaw?

Competition is good. Competition keeps us strong.

The fact that all instances talk to each other, makes me think we likely won't have wars.

I mean I'm subscribed to beehaw and kbin communities. And everything in between.

The important thing here is to get back to social networks and away from social media. The important entities here are the humans, not the memes or the money or the uplems or whatever we eventually call them.

Humans connecting with humans in ways that advance our collective well-being is the promise of social networks that Facebook and Twitter started. Once they saw how many users they had (and the bills for hosting and coding) they got hyper focused on making money.

Hypothetically we can avoid that fate here by having the job of hosting and coding spread out among many. Especially if we also come up with a way to crowd fund the costs of hosting and coding.

Why is the Shower Thoughts community essentially meta discussion of Lemmy and not, well, shower thoughts?

It has already started :) I'd say around 60% of major instances block exploding-heads, burggit and/or lemmygrad. Lemmygrad and EH in turn defederate a shitton of instances as well due to ideological reasons. Most "civility" or "law" related instances block piracy instances. The dbzer0 piracy instance blocks anything seen as too right-wingy cuz the owner is an anarchocommunist or something. LGBT instances are blocking & promoting for other instances to block instances that aren't too friendly to LGBT or are simply not moderating or even promoting homophobia & related topics. I actually made a tool called federation-checker.vercel.app/ that checks where an instance stands in the federation "war", so I know what instances to register onto if I wanna see some content that has been blocked by the instances I'm on.

This very much feels to me like the beginning of a Civ game, where we're all fresh nations with different starting conditions that are exploring our territories and building up armies....

The first schism is gonna be fairly dramatic, I'll bet.

Interesting to hear this from a dirty lemmy.fmhy.ml-er! 😈

Then I'll going to self host my own instances.

I can just imagine some controversial post and the replies saying “of course it’s a lemmy.world user”

Pretty grandiose to refer to discussions with a bit of trolling as a war.

I have been running a Mastodon instance since like 2016/17 and this has been quietly happening for the entire time I've been on the fediverse. (I can't check the exact date right now as I'm in the middle of upgrading it.)

Do you want to be in the Anime Girl Who Posts Nazi Memes Fediverse? How about the Queer Furry Fediverse? Or maybe you'd rather be in the Mocking Shitposts Fediverse? Perhaps you want the Everyone Has A Photo Of A Human And Thinks Federating With Facebook's Activitypub Is Actually A Good Idea Fediverse? Or how about the TERF/Gender-Critical Fediverse? Or the "Standalone" Social Site That Is Actually A Fediverse Instance With Federation Disabled And The Credits Removed In Violation Of The Source License?

Some of these Fediverses will happily talk with others. Some of them will rapidly defederate from others as soon as they encounter a place that clearly belongs to a Fediverse they are incompatible with. Some of them quickly get defederated from the Fediverses they are incompatible with. Some of them look at the #fediblock tag, some to keep aware of places worth pre-emptively blocking to make a chill place to talk, some to look for fellow people who have been cast out of someone else's chill zones.

Isn't it already? Lemmygrad, exploding-heads and other extremist instances have already been defederated. But the main feature is the federation itself, which also creates powerful alliances between instances with common values. Platform-wise, it will be just a matter of difference of use and leaning, but federation alliances will work the same

It is absolutely already a thing

sounds lit. do you all take butter and salt with your popcorn?

Instance meme wars.

Each participating instance must choose a "side" from a selection of political systems, religions, world views, etc. whose views it (the instance) has to represent.

The war takes place in a community that is unlocked for all instances, or on a separate instance.

All instances are listed and numbered. The opponent allocation is then done by a /random bot number generator.

The evaluation is then done by a /Poll of all instances.

The loser is kicked out and the new opponent for the winning instance is chosen again by /random bot.

Somehow, taco bell will win this war, too.