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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Why would it level off? The bigger instances will always be more visible and therefore generate more users and content right? Why would that change?
We actually see it happening on Mastodon.
Yes, the marquee server gets the bulk of the new signups, but accounts that are actually active long-term end up migrating to other instances all of the time. New users are seen to acclimate to the idea of the network, and if they're inclined do often end up looking for a home that's better suited to their interests.
They start at the big stop, generate their social graph, and then migrate. And there's nothing wrong with this pattern, especially in the face of the pathological frictionlessness that corporate social media has fetishized and promoted.
Oh yeah that makes sense. I thought it would be a Galton-Watson process like the one that led social media to mainly consist of 5 websites posting interactions on one to the other.
It almost certainly would be if account migration wasn't possible.
I think we'd see even more migration if Mastodon had post migration. I don't personally get why people are so hung up on that one, but, then, I've probably just been broken from a decade of having my favourite online communities die at the feet of Reddit.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with post migration once Calckey 14 goes gold. It could end up being adopted by other non-Mastodon microblogging servers, and then a shift not just away from mastodon.social could occur, but away from Mastodon the product. Not such a big one that it would topple the beast, as it were, but a big enough one to ensure the ecosystem remains healthy.
This is possible? Does it work with Lemmy instances or only other fediverse apps? Unfortunately web searches come up almost exclusively with moving from reddit to lemmy when looking for account migration stuff :/
AFAIK, you can't migrate lemmy accounts yet. I believe it's a planned feature.
But you can absolutely migrate Mastodon accounts to other Mastodon servers, or to some other server types (Calckey I know for sure). You can't migrate posts, though. Calckey has an experimental feature for importing posts, but I believe it puts a pretty heavy load on the site.
There were some suggestions to change the order of instances on join-lemmy.org so that smaller instances are shown near the top. So that could help to spread out users better.
Perhaps a couple of random instances can be picked out every day/week to be featured?
That could work but it would have to be coordinated with the admins of those instances.
Might be helpful to new users to curate a short list of "good" instances (semi-popular, good history of availability, open enrollment) and show them in a periodically-shuffled order as "recommended" or "popular" instances.
That, along with some github issue ideas I've seen relating to helping users get subscribed to places here, would probably help simplify the experience.
There are already recommended instances at the top, we just need to update them. I will make a post about that tomorrow.
Aha, sorry for spinning your wheels there! Sure enough.
This is exactly the thought I had. Add some randomness into what shown it will definitely help I'd think.
As someone new to the platform, the initial sign up process was a little daunting. Despite spending some time reading about it, and asking a couple of questions on reddit, “how to choose an instance” wasn’t a question I could easily find answers too. I gravitated towards larger instances assuming that the sign up process would be more streamlined, support would be better, and there would be less risk of permanent closure.
That being said, I plan to move to a smaller instance or host my own as my familiarity with the platform grows. I’ve seen similar sentiments by others on here as well
I'm personally kinda hoping that we will see less "general" Lemmy instances but more "interest oriented" or "alignment oriented" instances. I applaud the startrek / programming / piracy instances. Even the tankie and altright nut job instances are useful.