You should always direct people to a landing page where they can choose from or be directed to multiple different instances.
https://kbin.pub/en or https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list
https://join-lemmy.org/ or https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
You can direct people away from specific instances if, for example, they have been de-federated.
I strongly disagree with you. By encouraging a single site, rather than some nebulous part of a community, you take a lot of the decision and strife away, and help to bring new people to your “local” community. Trying to navigate the fediverse as a whole doesn’t interest me or a lot of people. Most people online do want monolithic platforms - see the move from IRC servers to ICQ/AIM/MSN/Y!Msgr, then the consolidation on AIM, and now Discord. The same goes with social media. Independent blogs and webrings led to myspace and facebook (and then just Facebook), independent food reviews led to Yelp, independent stores led to ebay & amazon. Forums led to Digg, Digg v4 was the rise of Reddit. People want to centralize into a community.
In spite of how it’s sold, the Fediverse doesn’t feel like a single community. It feels like a bunch of small towns meeting at the county fair. That’s the only way I can describe it. I don’t want to read stuff that’s happening over there, I want to have stuff happening here. And that’s before we get into defederated communities.
Sounds like a centralized system like reddit is more your thing then. There’s plenty of replacements out there like Squabbles that are centralized.
I absolutely would prefer Reddit - as it was under Aaron, before the takeover by Conde Nast/Advance & Spez. I’ve been on Hacker News, I looked briefly at Tildes. My goal is to be where the single largest user base is, to most effectively consume and communicate from a single group.
Absolutely agree. I totally get the idea of federated content and letting people make their own decisions, but the higher the barrier of entry, the less mainstream the fediverse will be. Especially right now, people are going to want an easy replacement for reddit, not learn a fundamentally new system that is still in the early adoption phase by tech people.
I get what you’re saying, but I just can’t agree. Putting a decision early in the onboarding process when they don’t have the context to make an informed decision, it adds a lot of friction. If you are referring friends or members of a community, refer an instance you believe in. If they find out later it doesn’t work for them, they can always move. Personally I found choosing an instance upfront put me off from joining lemmy for weeks. And ultimately it wasn’t a very important decision in the long run as nothing is guaranteed and you can always move.
The problem is that you end up with instances that are overloaded or lack the moderating muscle, IE lemmy.world.
Yes, the network effect is known to exist. The community is large, therefore it will continue to grow. On platforms/sites where the community is small, people will stay away, because there must be a reason not to join. Human nature is there opposite of load balancing.
I hear what you’re saying, but the reason it took me until the reddit blackout to join lemmy, even though I’d heard of it right after the API pricing was announced, was because I was paralyzed by choice and FOMO. What if I join an instance that gets defederated, or defederates, from something I enjoy? I have to either make a separate account over there or never see that content. Look at what just happened with Beehaw. If I’d stayed on lemmy.world (the first instance I joined), I’d be shit out of luck because half of what I’m subscribed to is Beehaw. The instance I’m on now has (so far) not defederated ANYTHING, which for me is a good thing, since it leaves my options completely open, regardless of whether I intend to use those options or not. It still doesn’t protect my instance from BEING defederated, but there’s nothing I can do about that. That type of uncertainty and FOMO needs to be addressed if the fediverse is going to continue to expand.
You are right that there are downsides. But my main concern is load balancing. Part of the reason lemmy.world has been cut off from Beehaw is BECAUSE too many people joined that one instance and now it is out of control.
Okay, but the same thing would have happened if they all joined Beehaw directly, or were spread out among many many instances. Part of Beehaw’s logic was “Well, a disproportionate amount of moderation had to be done to lemmy.world so we defederated”, but isn’t that simply because there are more users on that particular instance? If, for example, we assume every single lemmy.world user joined separate instances and behaved the exact same way, would Beehaw have defederated all of their instances? If not, then the response wasn’t the correct one, in my opinion. What happened is that Beehaw saw their mod work increasing, and nuked a large portion of their active userbase (federated users from non-Beehaw instances) to cut it down to try to maintain the culture they’re trying to build. Unfortunately, I think all it will have done is throttled their growth and Beehaw will become an isolated instance with no large communities on its own, because the communities that were there (that lemmy.world was participating in) will just be recreated on different instances.
The question is, are they generating enough content without that external source that it wasn’t felt much? If that’s the case, then it shouldn’t matter. If it isn’t, then people will leave and go to where the content is. Frankly speaking, my thought is that the federation should only be on as a backfill or last resort- if you’re unable to generate content and discussion organically, import someone else’s discussion.
