Yeah I'd love to see some more concrete info on what they mean by decentralized.

A bunch of people paying their own server costs to host their own mini facebook servers that they have to moderate and that show them ads? Lol. Horrifying.

But it seems like they just mean that it will be able to communicate with other decentralized networks, not that it is decentralized itself.

Hard agree. It's the instability of the user experience that really sucks here.

I do think this kind of thing may solve itself given more time. Instances will establish reputations and their behavior will become more predictable and dependable over time. Right now, users basically have to gamble when joining an instance, or be willing to juggle multiple accounts.

I'd assume it's better to stay away from small instances though, unless you know the owner. Small instances are very vulnerable. Who knows if that owner will keep maintaining the instance? If it disappears, so does your account.

It will take more time to establish norms. Other instances will certainly defederate and folks will become more accustomed to what that defederation means.

Instances are very vulnerable right now. There's not much ability to trust or predict how the owners of your instance will behave, because there isn't a long history of past behavior to look back on, so understandably some users will be frustrated by the lack of stability.

I do see one huge issue with how people are being instructed to join lemmy, which is that most resources tell people it doesn't matter which instance they join. That becomes fundamentally untrue with defederation.