this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
504 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37705 readers
377 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.
In fact most centralized systems have a ton of redundancy built in as well. Huge web platforms often 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.