There are many other instances. Feel free to join them :)

C'mon. No single instance has as many users as any of the top 20 sub reddits I bet. Spreading out over 5 main instances is fine. The important thing is if one instance shits the bed, you have options. If the community isn't served properly they can easily jump to a new instance.

programming.dev is thriving but we are also a niche, lots of good communities for developers.

I don't think anyone can tell where we're going. Mastodon.social was the largest instance by far for some time, then at the deluge, it splintered.

Part of the reason for Mastodon to fracture is specialization - each instance does something unique. Maybe Lemmy will do the same, maybe not.

But if we end up with 3 primary instances, it's still decentralized - I think the most useful feature of Lemmy isn't that we're spread out, it's that we could be.

lemmy.world's pretty big, but I'm still getting other places. More spread would always be good though. Counts from my all feed -

  48 | lemmy.world
  14 | beehaw.org
  12 | sh.itjust.works
   4 | lemmy.dbzer0.com
   4 | lemmy.film

C'mon. No single instance has as many users as any of the top 20 sub reddits I bet. Spreading out over 5 main instances is fine. The important thing is if one instance shits the bed, you have options. If the community isn't served properly they can easily jump to a new instance.

Decoupled from venture backed tech corporations is all that matters. Close second is actual people creating actual content, which feels like the case! Curious to see how moderation pans out in the long run, but at least it’s in the hands of the community itself.

You can check stats on instances here.

lemmy.world is #2 by total user count (lemmy.ml being the 1st), but #1 by active users.

And judging by the Local posts and Local comments count, it seems that .world users interact more with communities in other instances than the local ones, unlike the other top instances.

So I would dare to say that your concern over content being monopolized by .world (based on subscribers to local communities) isn't founded - high number of users, but they tend to subscribe and interact more with communities on other instances.

This is of course anecdotal (same as your example), but I tend to see the opposite in my feed - few posts from communities on .world. It's very subjective based on what you subscribed to.

The high number of users on .world is because it still has open registration (server was recently upgraded beyond current capacity).

I think people(people includes me, I tihnk the majority of users are new to this stuff) still don't get that unless a certain instance de-federalizes others en masse, you're still gonna be able to access it's content and contribute from your instance.

Although, in general,I wouldn't be worried. Even if a certain instance is getting big, you are still not subject to the whims of some venture capitalist corp in silicon valley.

I think we'll see a bunch of the top communities gravitate towards a few instances, but the userbase will spread out over time. Right now people are going to the biggest, b/c they just want to get on and try it out. But over time as people learn how to work with this new system they'll venture out to others. I could see a lot of people eventually hosting their own instance just for their one user, but have no communities of its own.

But for communities, finding an instance that has the right rules and plugins available will lead them to looking for trusted servers to moderate them from. As long as what Beehaw's doing doesn't become a trend, it should be fine

we're doing fine here on kbin, a little too much growth tbh. lemmy.world is pretty active but it's not the only active instance :)