Fedigrow

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.

Other issues experiences by Aussie.zone: https://aussie.zone/post/9964509/11627914

Thank you @Baku@aussie.zone

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.

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")

Regarding your last point, tools like Lemmy Federate make this less of an issue.

Just an FYI, some of your links broke, seems to be because it included closing brackets as part of the URL. The 2nd and 3rd one and bottom 2, specifically

Updated the post with history of LW controversial decisions

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.

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.

@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?

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