Both were down for me before, they seem to be up right now but just made this account on Lemmy.blahaj.zone (Henry is the name of my actual blahaj lol). It’s probably because of the traffic influx from reddit refugees from the absolutely disastrous spez ama (where he doubles down on everything and doesn’t apologize at all). Allegedly they’re trying to suppress Lemmy mentions but I guess it’s not working well enough lol
A good problem to have although long term we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with these spikes in traffic.
I’m of the opinion that it’s ok and natural for a few larger servers to emerge. The reason why I think it’s natural is because normal people frankly don’t care about the nuanced benefits about finding an instance that caters to their exact moderation preferences or philosophical pontifications about why Big Tech is bad. They just want to click on funny images, upvote them, and maybe comment once in a while.
I think that’s ok since I believe the ultimate goal of social media sites is to serve content for users’ consumption in a non-abusive way. The reason why I believe the fediverse is probably better than traditional social media is because it gives the power of choice. That power doesn’t need to be executed, but because it’s baked into the platform the users always have the ability to exercise it. If a large instance decides to screw over its users, then the users can simply move to another instance and still have full access to the network’s content. That power alone is what makes me ok with having few large instances.
I think the differing view here is ‘natural growth’ vs ‘forced growth’.
I don’t think large servers that come by being large because they’re the preferred choice for a given community, topic, reliability, or whatever other criteria become valuable are bad.
I think setting it up so that a new user is told ‘You go here, and you sign up on this instance.’ and writing all the onboarding stuff to direct them to the mega-instance for the sake of convenience because we can’t figure out how to make it simpler or more clear or explain how federation works isn’t the right path.
I will admit I do not have a fantastic answer on how to explain to someone who has limited technical knowledge exactly WHY federation is the way to go for communication and that the instance you should pick relies almost exclusively on the reliability of the service (is it fast? does it stay running? is it going to exist in six months?) and the trustworthiness of the admin (are they someone who you can deal with in terms of moderation? do you trust they’re not going to use their access to violate any trusts or behave in a way contrary to your beliefs?).
I’m old enough that my first foray into ‘federated’ content was Fidonet, and which BBS you called ‘home’ and posted from was almost exclusively a decision based on the local BBS community and the sysop because the messages and software were otherwise exactly the same from BBS to BBS.
So, my bias is that large instances can’t be close communities and that larger instances require different and more aggressive and impersonal moderation and the bigger you get the more true both become.
I think the term “forced growth” is a bit unfairly pejorative. Using “force” as a foil to “natural” has the connotation that encouraging people to register and participate by making the process easier is somehow unnatural. Making things easier is what I’m suggesting and it seems like you’re calling that kind of growth “forced”. I’m not suggesting that we make a bunch of fake accounts a la early Reddit to make Lemmy seem more active. We’re not registering the complete number of naturally appearing curious users, and I see that as a problem.
By “make it simpler”, I’m taking you to mean “making the process of finding an instance and registering on that instance so the user can interact with Lemmy simpler”. We both agree that the federated nature of Lemmy is a good thing. But inherent in the federated nature of Lemmy is that there are many instances; whoever wants to interact with Lemmy will need to settle on a home instance. To settle on a home instance, they first need to find an instance.
What I’m suggesting is that the process of finding an instance already introduces too much friction when someone doesn’t already know what an instance is and how instances interact with each other on the network. Making it simpler, in my opinion, must either consist in explaining what an instance is and how instances interact with each other in at most a sentence, or giving new users a default instance so they don’t have to think about it immediately.
Agreed, and that’s my basic point: we need to convey why an instance matters and provide a good way for someone to make an easy choice.
I wonder if something like what social media sites do in general might help: we let you pick a couple of interests, and you get a list of a small handful of vetted servers (who agree to something like Mastodon’s Server Covenant) to be funneled into. Like, instead of a list of 150, you get… 3.
Interests may not even be the right thing; maybe server policies and permitted subjects and moderation policies should be what’s asked, idk. But something that filters the numerous servers to a more vetted list without defaulting to just picking a big few feels like a more organic fix.
I also think the way content is federated right now is utterly confusing, but that feels more like a UI/UX problem that’s fixable than anything else. Server admins may be well served by picking a handful of big communities and federating without any user intervention just so that the basics are populated rather than requiring the users to find and pick communities one by one to federate, as well. The blank slate you get now is very offputting, even IF you know what you’re doing and how to go do it.
Glad we’re in agreement :D
Yeah, I think having something like an “interest matcher” of sorts on join-lemmy.org would be good.