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Upcoming AMA with Lemmy's Developers: Friday, Jan 26, 1500 CEDT (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.

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This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they'd like to myself, @[email protected] , SleeplessOne , or @[email protected] about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (7 children)

Its definitely a concern. IMO the lemmyverse is far too centralized at the moment. The big questions are:

Is there a trend toward centralization, or away from it?
How are people being introduced / onboarded onto lemmy?
What can we do to combat centralization?

(1) I'm honestly unsure, and I'd def appreciate if anyone has done a study of it. We've seen a big growth in single person / smaller topic-focused instances, which is a great thing, but if their communities aren't growing, we need to figure out how to reverse that trend. I'd have no problem with the current large instances, including this one, as long as the long-term-trend is away from them.

(2) Is mostly word-of-mouth, join-lemmy.org, and apps / web-ui's which show an instance by default.

We've made the sort for the join-lemmy.org instances page be by random active users, and tried to emphasize on that page that it doesn't matter which instance you join, since most federate, and can subscribe / connect to any community. I hope that helps, and we need to replicate that wherever we can.

Apps and webUI's mostly just show lemmy.world rn, where they should show random instances. I'm guilty of this in Jerboa as well (showing lemmy.ml by default), and I've just opened up an issue that it should be showing a random server for anonymous users.

But I think we need to do more, and I'd def appreciate yours and anyone else's ideas on how we can combat centralization. We need to get ahead of this problem before it gets worse.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

But I think we need to do more, and I’d def appreciate yours and anyone else’s ideas on how we can combat centralization.

I am admin of the biggest Brazilian instance, but I am welcoming more local instances and talking to the admins we should spread the load. But what I notice is the users are concerned they will miss out if they are not in an instance that already have everything.

Could we have an easier way to auto-federate every new communities from a given instance? Even an "auto-federate everything possible" option. as @[email protected] said lemmy DB isn't too big, most instance owners could have it on their servers. And making it opt-in won't hurt the small instances.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

It would be relatively easy to write a script/bot which fetches the list of communities from a given instance, and then subscribes to all of them from another instance. In fact I heard something like this already exists, but dont know the name.