Is Lemmy.world centralization worth fighting against?

Probably a very polarizing question.

On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.

On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance

History of LW controversial decisions

when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from !news@lemmy.world , it's still in !politics@lemmy.world )
when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )

74 comments

It's a big problem all across the fediverse. New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they've heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or "vanilla". Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.
This leads to the biggest server becoming a runaway train, which is bad for diversity and also bad for the admins because it makes it harder to manage the load. It's the same thing with mastodon.social.
I would encourage users to avoid the biggest instance as a rule, no matter which service they are signing up for. Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.
The problem is, there aren't a lot of "general purpose" Lemmy instances. Someone following my advice, who doesn't know better, might find themselves on hexbear, dbzer0, or lemmygrad. These are bad choices for a new user who expects something more or less equivalent to major centralized sites.
- Shamelessly plugging lemm.ee- it is exactly what you’re looking for when you say general purpose instance
- The problem is, there aren’t a lot of “general purpose” Lemmy instances.
  Or there aren't enough specific ones. If you go to Join Lemmy and you are presented with a number of general purpose instances, you are likely to pick the largest and only later realise the problems that entails and switch to another instance.
  If you are a Trekkie or read books or game or program then it is easy to pick one. Ditto if there is an instance specific to your country (I should know).
  If you look at Mastodon (which is more developed and has a wider and deeper selection of instances) you can see that these niches instances do well and I think we need to encourage more here.
  
  Can confirm that when choosing a Mastodon account, .social wasn't taking new users at the time. So I looked at the list and chose vmst.io because "Oh, I'm a nerd too."
  I'll say that while the number of connections is far lower, so far I haven't noticed that as a problem in the limited capacity that I use Mastodon.
- Indeed.
  Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.
  That's probably good for Mastodon, but for Lemmy there isn't so much choice. My rule of thumb, in order is
  lemm.ee
  sh.itjust.works if you are ok with the name
  discuss.tchncs.de or lemmy.ca depending if you are located in Europe or North America
  lemmy.zip as they are good contenders, but a bit smaller than the others
  
  Any reasons for choosing discuss.tchncs.de over feddit.de?
  Edit: Oh wait, is feddit.de down? Have they been having issues recently?
- New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they’ve heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or “vanilla”. Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.
  It's a little less the case with Lemmy and other less popular fediverse stuff, but isn't a large number of vague/general purpose instances a contributor to this? In other words, wouldn't more focused instances help reduce this problem?
  A big benefit of federation shines with topic-focused instances in that it ensures an already curated local feed to your main interest (or interests), meanwhile remaining able to connect with and discuss more general interest stuff via home and federated feeds.
  
  Something to that, for sure. The only problem is if the choices are overwhelming. People like choice when it's immediately comprehensible and meaningful, and hate it with a vengeance when it's not. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
  Mastodon is already pretty good about this with the official app and nevertheless, the most common complaint I heard during the Twitter exodus was that signing up for Mastodon was too complicated. Lemmy is far worse in this regard. The closest thing to an "official" Lemmy app doesn't even have "Lemmy" in the name, and doesn't pop up on the first screen of results in Google Play.
  
  Definitely, but I guess the amount of sysadmins wanting to operate a lemmy instance is limited. Add to that the CSAM and other nasty stuff that happened at the beginning, and only a few people would be okay to manage their own instance.
  Also, even a topic-focused instance would suffer from the lack of population. How many interesting topic can you find for a population of 50k? That can't be too precise, because you are talking to a very small population. Well, I guess that's why db0 and slrpnk are doing well, piracy and solarpunk are popular among Lemmy users (as well as whatever the political stance of lemmy.ml is)

I think until there’s some tool or system that helps collate all the information out here, fragmentation is detrimental to growth.
If the same story is posted in multiple communities, I’m only posting the first one I come across. Sometimes that becomes the next big discussion and other times it’s lost and another community takes over.
I’m not going to copy and paste the same comment with every mirrored post.
So sometimes commenting feels like a waste of time.
Centralizing helps ensure that there’s vibrant, consistent discussion which is what Lemmy should be about.
In my mind, the fix is that all posts to the same link should just collect the discussion all in one place, regardless of which community spawned it.
There may be a ton of good reasons that isn’t happening, but until there’s some sort of fix, centralization ensures you find a discussion and can contribute meaningfully.
- Hello,
  Thank you for your comment.
  I agree with the fact that a story of post should only exist once, as you said. I guess the remaining question is what to do where there are two communities for the same topic.
  I have a good example that I just stumbled upon: !map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz is the most active community about maps, has usually one post per day every day for the last few months. Once in a while, someone posts on !mapporn@lemmy.world, and they instantly get a lot more comments than the first community.
  !games@sh.itjust.works is also quite active, despite not being on LW.
  Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?
  
  I would prefer we didn’t give up on federation, but until the tools are in place to mechanically support it, I don’t see it as strictly beneficial.
  A post a day in a community is a bot, more often than not, and trying to create discussion on bot posts often just falls on deaf ears.
  I don’t see a reason to push for fragmentation at this time, but rather organically support active communities wherever they’re found.
  I’d love for there to be a mechanical solution to fragmentation, so you don’t see so many duplicate posts in your feed and all those individual discussions are instead in one place.
  
  Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?
  No. Half the point of federation is that not only communities (instances) can carry their own content but also their own culture. Posting or commenting about a soccer personality in, say, !spain@soccer.xyz is vastly different from doing it in, say, !soccerdrugs@news.world, even if the originating link to the discussion is the same.
  
  Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?
  Might it not be more beneficial for related communities to, in the way of the old web, highlight each other in pinned/featured posts and sidebars? The idea being that there's still some benefit to different moderation styles and community cultures/vibes.
  Maybe also encouraging community moderators to communicate with each other more to figure out how they want their communities to be, how they might want to differ to create more distinct identities?

lemmy.world has middling to bad moderation.
lemmy.world also has at least a few divisive mods who are close friends of the lemmy.world admins and are known to retain their positions for that reason.
lemmy.world is by far the largest instance.
taken alone, none of these are a problem. together i find that concerning and exactly the kind of reason the fediverse was built to avoid.
- Are there bad moderators on LW? Do you have examples? I feel like they're maybe a little stretched thin on trying to keep up with things, and so sometimes make snap decisions, but lemmy.ml is the only place I've actually seen moderation that I would describe as deliberately bad.
  
  they are certainly stretched thin, which i would categorize more as an attackable problem than an excuse for poor performance.
  i do have a few examples off the top of my head tho
  !unpopularopinion was left uterly unmoderated for months. rage bait and even some downright nazi shit was almost constant on there. any community in that situation should have been immediately shut down by admins but was not.
  !world mods have a nasty habit of butting in with mod flared comments on user reports without taking action. they defend this as “adding context” when the “context” involved is highly subjective, partisan, and verging on defense of harrassment, and not at all fitting the diversity of content that constitutes a “world news” community.
  this might be more of a general lemmy problem but there doesn’t seem to be auto-flagging going on for common sense harrasment language? like i see slurs against races, ethnicities, and the mentally disabled almost daily and they don’t get removed for hours until a user reports it sometimes.
- I keep hearing about bad moderation, so I guess it's indeed an issue.
  It is really a compromise, there is no ideal situation. Should we initiate something and ask people to leave LW due to bad moderation? That would probably be seen as unnecessary drama.
  
  i don’t think compounding problems imply a single compound solution.
  instead, tackle each problem directly.
  encourage account migration to combat overcentralization
  encourage installment of more mods to combat ineffectual moderation
  call for transparency in moderator selection to combat cronyism

Every time I want to post a politics article, I have to decide whether to post @lemmy.world (and exclude the Beehaw people and include the trolls and reach more people) or @beehaw.org (and exclude the World people and help the growth of a community that seems better, but reach a lot less people).
IDK what the answer is
- Hello, good to see you here!
  I completely get what you mean. Beehaw creates its own kind of situation. For a long time I was hoping they would refederate with SJW and LW, especially after 0.19.X where users could block instances on their own, but I guess that's never going to happen.
  It's really a shame, because people and communities on Beehaw are really valuable
  
  Heyo! Hello to you.
  I mean, I get it. I saw the announcement that bad-faith posts from lemmy.world were creating so much moderation load that it was simply impossible for them to federate with LW and have the kind of community they wanted to have. And I thought, well that's kind of surprising to me, IDK what that's about. And then I started participating more heavily on lemmy.world and then I thought, oooooohh, that's what they were talking about. It all makes sense now.
- Why not post to both with Lemmy's cross-post feature?
  
  To be fair, I cross post a lot, but over time I gets a bit annoying, especially when you know that today with user-level federation maybe Beehaw could consider refederating with LW and SJW

I am usually trying to encourage people to host communities on other instances (recently moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee, but sometimes it feels like fighting against the current.
What do you think?

Regarding your last point, tools like Lemmy Federate make this less of an issue.
- Indeed, I use it from time to time, but from my experience, it seems like LW users tend to stay on their local feed, increasing the visibility of their local communities compared to ones from other instance
  
  Is Lemmy World's default when signed in local? Or is this a consequence of many more active communities being there?
  
  Can't help those who won't help themselves 🤷‍♂️

@otter@lemmy.ca, I wanted to ask you about something: I posted to !til@lemmy.ca in the past, but it seems that now the community isn't actively moderated, and on the other side !todayilearned@lemmy.world is getting a resurgence.
Do you think it is worth it trying to post to the lemmy.ca one, or should we go with the flow and post on the LW one to make it grow?
- We were actually checking into this recently! While the mods look inactive from the post history, there is an active mod keeping an eye on the community.
  I'm planning to make more posts to !til@lemmy.ca, and while I'm not sure which one will be best in the long run, I want to try and see if we can grow this one.
  As for the other communities, I'm planning to go through and clean up moderation sometime in the next little while :)
  
  Alright, good to know! I see if I can find stuff to post there, but usually I post to !interestingasfuck@lemm.ee as there is some overlap, and the community got some traction a few days ago

Communities on big instances have a chance to grow. So once it gets big enough on something like world, they could put up a movement post and switch the community onto a smaller server. I have a lemmy ml community but it only has 227 subs so its currently not worth moving. There are enough subscribers that some posts get upvoted and end up like with 25 upvotes in a hurry so they appear on the tops lists. Obviously, the more the community hits the top lists, the more people will see it and maybe subscribe to it.
- I have a lemmy ml community but it only has 227 subs so its currently not worth moving.
  I would have thought that a smaller community would be easier to move, as there would be less inertia and inconvenience. I've deliberately created some communities on smaller servers and cross-posted to more general communities on larger servers to help with visibilty.

Hot take: No.
Lemmy.world being the "main" instance is natural, and Lemmy makes it difficult to discover new communities so it's also natural that lots of discussion would be in lemmy.world, too.
There was also still an unresolved issue where some instances can disappear and take out all their communities. Remember lemmy.film? I believe the Lemmy devs once said they want to make a system to migrate communities in case something like this happens but nobody knows when it'll get added.
I think it's a platform problem, I understand that connecting to all sorts of instances is the point of the fediverse but until it becomes more intuitive and less dangerous, I'm going to just stick with the most popular communities. Attempting to move people out of lemmy.world and into other duplicate communities will only split people more.

Other issues experiences by Aussie.zone: https://aussie.zone/post/9964509/11627914
Thank you @Baku@aussie.zone

spreading out a bit would be nice, although there are some things that could help some of these issues anyways
federation: parallel sending per instance
Federate lightweight list of communities to ease discovery / find remote communities (helps "every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance")
- From what I read on the aussie.zone thread (https://aussie.zone/post/9964509/11627914 ) they already tried a few things
  The last one would be to have a proxy in Europe, but they don't want to (which I can understand)
  
  yea but the new parallel sending feature should help them more, we'll see when it gets released

Yknow that's one of the main reasons why I exclusively create communitys and smallerish instances. Especially blahaj zone my beloved

The issue is that a tool to migrate all contents, likes and followers doesn't exist so people are afraid to build on small instances
- True, but after all this time I wouldn't trust Lemm.ee or SJW less than LW

Updated the post with history of LW controversial decisions

74 comments