I'm running a small instance, thelemmy.club

We even have built in Voyager/WefWef at app.thelemmy.club :P

I don't advertise is too often as I'm not trying to get huge, we have about 120 users and have been up a month. But we have plenty of resources to grow a little.

Mine is sorta like this, it's pretty quiet but then also happens to have the biggest Steam Deck community.

Tinfoil hat theory: OG Lemmyheads are attacking the big centralized communities and taking them down in order to force all the new users to spread amongst the smaller instances like we're supposed to, preventing inevitable corporate control of the ActivityPub platform

I doubt that's anywhere close to the truth but I choose to believe it, crusty old hackers pulling the plug on their children for our own good

Why can't we have community tags for grouping? Like have a "tag" you can subscribe to that encompasses all "meme" communities, or "politics", etc. Then if something goes down people can default to whatever. Maybe you could even make it so if you wanted to post you could post it into tag and the tag decides based off metrics which community to actually post it in? Idk, maybe I am dumb. But that seems cool.

For communities, I feel like a good solution would be to let mods link similar communities from different instances together, sorta like an automatic cross post.

Ideally every minor Instance could have one major community located there, that could serve as the central space for that particular community. That’s pretty impossible of course, but it paints the picture.

You could probably do that if you had a centralised coordinator who could assi... I'll see myself out.

Part of the problem is discoverability. If people don't use my instance, they rarely know we have independent communities like !todayilearned@civilloquy.com. Some, like !games@civilloquy.com are really shadowed by larger versions where some sort of multi community subscription could help a lot.

I feel like we’re seeing the inherent flaws of the fediverse here in some aspects. A completely democratic spread or spread in general of communities doesn’t seem like it’s going to work. Real people and infrastructure are behind making sure instances with communities that serve large amounts of user requests stay up and operable. Infrastructure costs people and money, and people with right skills and fundraising skills are not evenly distributed.

If an instance touts itself to be a mega-instance, that’s one thing. Lemmy is still a confusing place to understand if I should create my own community or join one. Some communities and instances have a lot more % active users and moderators than others.

People are also lazy. Hosting your own instance is “easy” until you have a popular community, or handful of popular communities. Unless you treat it like a job, not a whole lot of people are interested in spending time figuring out fundraising and dev ops to ensure their community can deal with future user growth.

Money, talent, and physical infrastructure aren’t evenly and fairly available. So it makes it difficult to produce a federated universe that doesn’t reflect these things.

Can’t expect new users to go down the rabbit hole of trying to understand what instance they should make an account on. All instances will grow over time and we are seeing a lot of unevenness because of factors stated above. Instances will surely balance out as time goes on, so I think whoever is prematurely attacking large instances—whether they are doing so for fediverse axiom related issues or not—is making fundamental mistakes of fediverse theory.

Like the anchor tenant of a shopping mall.

Mastodon account also works as a backup since you can subscribe to communities and post comments from there.

Centralization is natural, even in the fediverse. A successful lemmy is going to look like tens of large instances, a few hundred medium instances, and a ton of tiny and irrelevant instances. Even if federation and discovery get more transparent it's still likely going to be mostly centralized.

There's only one person to blame for the sudden explosion of users of a new and undeveloped system. I see this all as a good thing to happen in the beginning, as it will help improve and solidify solutions now, rather than years later when things are more established. There will be shuffling and mirroring of communities, and tools made to help in that cause, and all of that will make the overall fediverse better.

aleluyah

hallelujah?

I keep seeing Vlemmy mentioned but I guess I missed the drama. Did the server admin unexpectedly shut the server down?

Except when sh.itjust.works went down later too lol

https://lemmy.world/post/1604919