Whether you are a Reddit refugee (I am one) or just randomly stumbled upon Lemmy and decided to join lemmy.world, welcome to the Fediverse.
If you have been here for long enough and settled in and now finally feel comfortable with Lemmy, I highly advice you to move to smaller instances. I just newly left Lemmy.world to join Lemm.ee.
We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance. This will benefit the admins of Lemmy.world a lot as they would not have to deal with such a high amount of users. It also leaves room for new users to join and have a good experience rather than an experience filled with server outages where they will give up on Lemmy.
But honestly, social media naturally benefits from everyone being around the biggest totem pole. It means we can randomly run into people and topics and communities that we never knew we wanted to engage with.
If we decentralize, we need an already established community-web, or a very specific plan for which to find in the future. Plus, I’ll be honest, between Mastodon, Lemmy and (now) Firefish, I can say that finding communities on the fediverse is annoying in all the right ways to make someone just go back to Twitter/Reddit. I can’t blame people for not wanting to engage with that.
But, importantly: Most users being on a huge central instance solves that problem. Yeah it goes against “the spirit of the fediverse”. But for the user, it has effectively only upsides.
But you’ll still see all content from every federated instance in your feed? It doesn’t matter which one you’re signed up to.
You may need to search for the community first for your instance to know about it. That hampers discovery a lot imo.
Oh is that true? So when I search for an instance on the app I use (Connect) is the list of communities that appear only there because people have subscribed to them once? Or am I seeing everything but it won’t appear in everyone’s feed until I subscribe to it?
They don’t have to subscribe, but somebody has to have searched specifically for that community, so kinda yes.
People here promote scripts and bots so that an instance gets automatically subbed to new communities - which ok, but then which small instances really want to mirror the whole Fediverse? Most will run out of hard drive space, and we’re back at square one.
There is nearly no benefit of being on the largest instance. In fact many would benefit from a smaller instance.
Playing devil advocate, here : you can expect the life expectancy of bigger instances to be slightly to significantly bigger, if anything because their admins feel more responsibility due to the number of users depending on them. That argument does not hold if we’re comparing using a big instance vs self-hosting, though (the life-expectancy of your self hosted instance may be smaller, but if you shut it down it means you’re not interested anymore in the fediverse, so no big deal - except maybe for the holes you leave behind you). And anyway, I’m not sure better life expectancy is more important than making sure the fediverse stays decentralized.