this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I dislike the idea of multiple communities for the same topic spread across multiple instances. Sure, you can subscribe to multiple communities, but that's just extra overhead. I'm hopeful reddit backs down after the protest (as unlikely as it may be), but either way I will probably go back to using it regardless. Social media is about content, and unless there is a dramatic shift away from reddit being the content hub that it currently is, nothing else will be as useful.
There is a good chance users will flock to the biggest one and we won't have the doubling issue.
Yes, that probably right. But it also goes against one of the supposed benefits of the Fediverse. Which makes the whole distributed system thing a bit pointless.
Eh, Mastodon is currently 80% of the Fediverse. Lemmy today just moved above 100,000 users -- which is a big deal, but it's no Mastodon. Even if everyone on Lemmy congregates to one server, that's more diversity for the Fediverse.
It does not go against the benefits at all.
The fact that a user from any instance can join a community on any other instance is exactly what federation is all about!
I just don't see how this actually benefits the average user compared to a centralized system. To me it's a bit like trying to apply Blockchain technology to everything regardless of how appropriate it may be. I'm sure plenty here disagree with me and that's fine.
Centralized systems tend to be brittle and authoritarian.
Most centralized systems have a ton of redundancy built in as well. Huge web platforms especially have massive amounts of redundancy - some content is replicated hundreds of times and spread around the globe to ensure that users everywhere will have fast response times.
So in fact, the real difference between a centralized platform and something like Lemmy comes down to whether or not here is a single corporate entity who has full contol over the course of the platform or not.
No, it isn't, because of resilience. reddit as a gigantic instance would take out a lot, but the whole ecosystem of UI, clients etc. would have stayed identical. It would be a much softer switch. Shutdowns of large instances are an issue and lemmy's user history is not portable (hopefully it will be). This has better future prospects.