If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory) 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.
imma have undercover alts everywhere for the sole purpose of getting all the cats communities in one page.
Your legend well be carved into the pages of history as the first person to complete the catalog!
One benefit that people don’t talk about enough is it naturally tends towards smaller community sizes than in a centralized system which is a better fit for our tribal human brains.
We’re not great with speaking into a room with 1,000 people in it, much less a million.
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.
There is nothing better than a good old tribe war.
One of the oldest human pastimes, hating people who are different from you in some way, no matter how inconsequential.
“You ever notice that? Any time you see two groups of people who really hate each other, chances are good they’re wearing different kind of hats. Keep an eye on that, it might be important.” - George Carlin
What’s the Gentoo equivalent of an instance?
Building a CLI ActivityPub client from source.
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Please do instance wars also on PeerTube, it’s noone land right now.
The problem with transitioning from YouTube to PeerTube is that without a critical mass of users it’s just not worth it for creators. But without creators the users won’t go there, because there’s no content.
Lemmy has that problem to a much lesser extend because this kind of platform is way more focused on the interaction between users. Or put differently, everyone is a creator here.
A tool that uploads and updates videos across multiple platforms while syncing descriptions, tags, etc is something that would be incredibly handy for creators while also being something that PeerTube could piggyback off of. “Why not upload my video to another platform I’ve never heard of? It can only lead to more exposure.”
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.
That’s totally something a kbin user would say.
I’m new… What are Beehaw and kbin?
Beehaw is a large lemmy instance which is notable for defederating from some other large instances recently due to their own admin policy. Kbin is an alternate federated platform similar to Lemmy, and the two can mostly work with each other.
What are instances and federations?
I just thought that it was Reddit, but with a different backend. But people are talking like there’s more to it than that…
Ok so Lemmy itself isn’t really a single app or service like Reddit, rather it’s a software project that people can run on their own servers. It’s a bit like email in that regard, anyone can run an email server, or you can just join someone else’s like Gmail (think of instances as being like these). Instances can have their own rules and customisations, but they all still talk email (in lemmys case, something called activitypub) and work together, and you can send and receive content from other people even if they’re on a different email provider (lemmy instance). Federating is basically two different instances agreeing to connect and share their content with each other. This generally happens by default. Defederating is the opposite, deciding to stop sending and receiving content from a particular instance.
Email is also a federated platform just like Lemmy. You can have email clients that talk to email servers, but “email” itself isn’t really an app you can just run, it’s a collection of apps and servers that all work together. Lemmy is very similar.
Also worth noting, the language (or protocol, to use the technical term) that Lemmy uses to talk between instances is called ActivityPub, and a whole bunch of different services such as Mastodon and Kbin use this! Together, these services are known as the “Fediverse” and the really cool thing is that they can all talk to each other because they speak the same language! If you want to, you can technically browse and post on Lemmy from Mastodon, and vice versa, even though they’re completely different services. While it’s a bit tricky with Mastodon since its much more like Twitter than Reddit, Kbin works really well with Lemmy and is generally interchangeable. People on Lemmy can join in on Kbin and vice versa. The whole system is really neat and if it sounds interesting, you should absolutely google it some more and learn all about it! It’s a community project so if you like it and want to get involved, you can help create any part of this from contributing to Lemmy’s code to running your own instance.
Thanks for the explanation and the time taken to write it.
I’m starting to figure it out as I stumble my way around it. For example I’ve found that Lemmy.World (my ‘home’ instance) isn’t big on NSFW stuff, so I’ve made an account on another instance and linked the two.
Thanks again!
Already happening. Have you heard of Beehaw?
Competition is good. Competition keeps us strong.
what about beehaw? i’ve seen it around, but know not of any instance wars.
Beehaw defederated from a lot of servers and nobody knows why.
It’s because they’re lame.
I just hope that most people will be open-minded and that most instances will federate. But that’s probably being optimistic.
No, this is exactly what will happen, though there will be bubbles of similar minded instances, no doubt, but given the federate nature of this all, I don’t think someone will make their instance incompatible to the rest, except of course some corpos get their hands on it… looking at meta
The 2nd largest instance has already de-federated themselves to create a walled garden with reddit-style moderation, eg you can be banned because the mods don’t like what you said, even if it does not break the rules. That instance is: beehaw.
sounds lit. do you all take butter and salt with your popcorn?
Have you tried nutritional yeast?
hippy
I’m sorry, but I read that and thought “marmite on popcorn?!”
And I found that idea intriguing.
Not quite the same thing as Marmite. Might be a North American thing?
https://www.amazon.ca/Bragg-Nutritional-Yeast-Seasoning-Premium/dp/B00EHVN1S6
Ah, thanks! I’ll be on the look out for this.
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.
💀
This is an avengers level threat
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