Most people access the Fediverse through one of the large instances: lemmy.world, kbin, or beehaw. New or small instances of Lemmy have no content by default, and can most easily get content by linking to larger Lemmy instances. This is done manually one “Community” at a time (I spent 15 minutes doing this yesterday). Meanwhile, on larger instances, content naturally aggregates as a result of the sheer number of users. Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it’s inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances. It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.
I actually think the Fediverse is in the beginning the process of fragmenting into siloed smaller, centralized instances. Beehaw, which is on the list of top instances, just blacklisted everyone from lemmy.world. Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other. It is possible that this fragmentation and instability? of Lemmy instances will kill the viability of Federated Reddit altogether, but hopefully not.
These are my main takeaways from my three days on the Fediverse. I will stick around to see if the Fediverse can sustain itself after the end of the Reddit blackouts.
Reddit isn’t totally free of this problem (feature) either–You can have multiple subreddits dedicated to the same topic.
True, but there you don’t have the problem that you can access subreddit “gamingB” but not “gamingA” because you happen to be logged in on an instance that defederated “gamingA”.
You can just access all of the different subreddits with one account and freely choose on which on you’d like to post and always able to see every post ever made in every sub.
With Lemmy as it is now, I don’t even know if the posts I see in a community on InstanceA really are all posts because there might be posts made by people on InstanceB that is blocked by InstanceC that I’m accessing the community of InstanceA with.
That’s my biggest concern right now.
I noticed this today when I had a comment chain on lemmy.world that I accesed with my lemm.ee instance. That chain was >10 posts long with several different users from different instances.
When I looked into that community with my feddit.de account, I could only see the first two comments of that chain, not even my own lemm.ee comments were visible despite not being blocked by feddit.de.
It was because the third post of that chain was made by a user on an instance that is blocked by feddit.de and that lead to all following posts also missing.
So now I’m feeling like I’m possibly missing big parts of all those comment sections just because I happen to be on an instance that blocked someone that might participate in them.
Hell, I don’t even know if you can see this post because it could be that your instance defederated from my instance.
