Incredible to think about that we got it right the first time (with email) and still had to spend the last 20 years complaining about centralized social networks.

  • notanapple@lemm.eeEnglish
    40·
    2 days ago

    I dont think its the software* but the instance that matters. Everyone being on lw is not good (not that there is anything wrong with lw, just that centralization is bad). Thankfully most lemmy apps nowadays default to lemm.ee which should hopefully counter most of the centralization. Lemmy apps should rotate the default server when it gets too big which will help a lot (also shows the impact defaults have).

    *Software would have mattered if the main devs instance was also the biggest. Or a very popular lemmy client defaulted to their own instance. With lemmy thats not the case.

    • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
      12·
      2 days ago

      I do not agree with you. Yes I’m a developer myself of Mbin. And I created Mbin. However, the problem with decentralization is that you still need to trust the developers who are building the decentralized apps. So within a decentralized ecosystem the centralized point are the developers and its project.

      If you do not agree with Lemmy, you can go to Mbin. And visa versa; if you do not agree with Mbin devs, you can go to Lemmy, etc. Meaning you do need to have alternatives, otherwise choice is an illusion and decentralization is also an illusion.

      ~ Melroy, Mbin developer.

    • sabzian@lemmy.mlEnglish
      16·
      2 days ago

      Great point. If defaults didn’t matter Google wouldn’t have spent billions of dollars buying the default search position on other browsers.

    • humiddragonslayer@lemm.eeEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      I think a surefire way to help with this would be to have a rule that any instance that becomes the largest one on Lemmy should lock itself instantly. That way, we’ll only surpass the current max number of users on a single instance until it’s completely spread out

      • SmokeyDope@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        18 hours ago

        I’m not sure the smaller Lemmy servers running on a pi or resident internet upload could handle the equal sizable fraction of .world . it would be interesting to calculate how many users total on Lemmy divided by how many public joinable instances and see the averages or which servers are forced to scale the most.

        This would take away complete user freedom to choose the server they want which is controversial.