The Fediverse requires federated thinking as well as federated technology. Critical thinking can be hard when its been so easy to just consume what you’ve been fed without question since you were born.

I think once adding communities from outside your instance becomes a little easier we’ll see that. A lot of newcomers had some trouble figuring out how federation works and went where a lot of the activity was

Let’s put things in perspective. Lemmy.world currently has a “whopping” 127k users. That’s fewer users than the moderately successful niche subreddit I created on Reddit has, which is just one of several thousand subreddits over 127k in size. Not to mention the tens of thousands of Instagram, youtube, facebook, tiktok, etc., pages with more than 127k subscribers. Saying lemmy.world has “a lot of power” at this point seems like a real stretch to me.

Yes please! Lemmy.world and lemmy.ml shouldn’t make up the majority of my feed.

I think best case scenario, you have themed instances based around art, tech, politics, news, gaming, food, etc, and the largest communities are hosted there. Then you have “catch all” instances like lemm.ee which federate with everything, there can be as many of these instances as needed as the user base grows. These types of instances should be where the bulk of the new user accounts go, assuming just an average user looking for a /all replacement. Curated instances like beehaw allow for a more fine-tuned experience, but should still function basically as a catch all and not as “hosting the content” instance.

However I understand that building up to that is damn near impossible with the current infrastructure. We would basically need a means to migrate an entire community to a new instance, while simultaneously updating everybody’s subscriptions to reflect the new home of the community.

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I started on one of the smaller instances, and guess what? They didn’t make it. I spent about two days setting up my account searching for all the communities I wanted, and had a great feed. Then about a week later, they were gone. I can’t fault the admin- they were doing a lot of work and running up a server bill largely for gratis, but I lost all that setup time. So when I had to start a new account I chose to go to one of the moderately large instances because I didn’t want it to go poof overnight again.

What I’m saying is there is safety in the medium to large instances.

That said, I do have some problems with some of the largest instances throwing their weight around in performing global bans on users from other instances whose world views differ from theirs.

This has its negatives. If someone makes twenty-seven different hate speech communities spread out over twenty-seven instances, it becomes harder to exterminate them like the vermin they are. If they all congregate on one overly-permissive instance, you can defederate them and call it a day. Much easier.

Join a local instance, and then don’t forget to donate to it

I do still see value in a general landing page for new lemmy users, but this whole thing has really shown me that it should not be anything like this. .ml and .world have done a lot of work becoming the “big” instances and now they have a taste for censorship (and have most the users) I doubt it will get better.

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Correct me if this is already a thing, but it would be nice if you could post to multiple communities at once and have users see comments across all communities and instances. So a user posts “A” on instances X, Y and Z all under communities run on those instances at the same time. When making the post, you select ehich communities the post goes to instead of just one. Users on instances X, Y and Z see it as a single post it appears in all of the communities the user specifies. A limit might be useful here to prevent trial spam. A user commenting on the post in instance X will be seen on the other instances and communities where that post was made.That way, you could remove the centralisation on instances and communities (one community or instance might remove the thread, but everybody else still sees it and each others comments in the remaining communities/instances.) This has a few advantages:

• People are incentivised to post to smaller communities knowing that larger ones will also get the same post and everybody can see each others comments.
• If a moderator of a community removes the post, it still disappears in their community, but not the whole instance. If the thread still exists in other communities in the same instance, users of that instance can still participate in the post on those communities.
• If the post is banned instance-wide, it is banned across all communities in the instance at once. This could include non-local communities.
• Users in other instances will still be able to see the post and continue contributing to it. You can only remove the post from your own instance.

Is there a list somewhere