Isn’t it creating a situation of Reddit power mods on steroids? It’s easy to say “well go and make accounts on multiple instances”, but it’s creating additional barriers to entry that a lot of people won’t understand and frankly is kind of irritating as a user.
I feel like people aren’t taking the consequences seriously and that defederating needs to be viewed as like a nuclear option that’s avoided unless absolutely necessary. That’s what I get from the additional information you provided.
This place will become completely unusable in the future if the good will dies out and large instances decide to defederate from each other to try and become the “top” instance, especially as more and more casual users move over.
Isn’t it creating a situation of Reddit power mods on steroids?
Not sure, how do you see that? Isn’t the ability to “vote with your feet” putting a limit on how powerful they can become?
a lot of people won’t understand and frankly is kind of irritating as a user
That’s true. We need to become better at communicating and explaining these situations. I plan to use the wiki more. To have one comprehensive source of truth, which can be linked to, instead of partial explanations scattered across comment sections.
But even then, a distributed model is probably inherently more complex and hader to understand than a centralized solution. The benefit is more resilience against power-hungry tendencies.
Realistically most people aren’t going to make their own instance, so you kind of have to rely on the good will of others.
Purely as an example, let’s say that Lemmy world decides they no longer want to be federated with ML because of the Meta situation. If you’re on either world or ML now you’ve lost access to huge sections of Lemmy. This could basically go on forever, so any instance that wants to remain neutral can be locked out of either both or one of them as they keep defederating from instances until the whole thing becomes a walled garden, basically the same as if you upset a power mod on Reddit and lose access to huge sections of the site, except it’s worse on here because you wouldn’t even be able to lurk.
I guess you could just have multiple accounts, but we could easily see a situation where you need like 10 accounts just to see the most popular instances, which is obviously ridiculous and not practical unless you’re terminally online.
It seems like a pretty huge flaw in the system, to be honest. Theoretically it’s a good idea, but as more and more people flock to the large instances it seems like it’s only a matter of time before the power plays start to happen.
Is there anything at all to stop that happening? It’s seems inevitable to me that eventually the whole thing will fall apart if people abuse the system.
If what you describe is severe enough, that’s a significant disadvantage of being registered on a big instance, and using communities which are hosted on a big instance. Which in turn makes smaller instances and smaller communities more appealing.
I think it’s self-regulating. The transitional period (like the current reddit exodus) is always a bit rough. Long term, things will survive which are fine for all participants.
Worst case, it’s always much easier to move within the fediverse than it is to move between entirely different platforms and ecosystems. Yes, power plays and nasty circumstances are possible, but moving inside the fediverse is so much easier compared to the outside world. And being able to move is a safeguard against bad conditions.
Isn’t it creating a situation of Reddit power mods on steroids? It’s easy to say “well go and make accounts on multiple instances”, but it’s creating additional barriers to entry that a lot of people won’t understand and frankly is kind of irritating as a user.
I feel like people aren’t taking the consequences seriously and that defederating needs to be viewed as like a nuclear option that’s avoided unless absolutely necessary. That’s what I get from the additional information you provided.
This place will become completely unusable in the future if the good will dies out and large instances decide to defederate from each other to try and become the “top” instance, especially as more and more casual users move over.
Not sure, how do you see that? Isn’t the ability to “vote with your feet” putting a limit on how powerful they can become?
That’s true. We need to become better at communicating and explaining these situations. I plan to use the wiki more. To have one comprehensive source of truth, which can be linked to, instead of partial explanations scattered across comment sections.
But even then, a distributed model is probably inherently more complex and hader to understand than a centralized solution. The benefit is more resilience against power-hungry tendencies.
Realistically most people aren’t going to make their own instance, so you kind of have to rely on the good will of others.
Purely as an example, let’s say that Lemmy world decides they no longer want to be federated with ML because of the Meta situation. If you’re on either world or ML now you’ve lost access to huge sections of Lemmy. This could basically go on forever, so any instance that wants to remain neutral can be locked out of either both or one of them as they keep defederating from instances until the whole thing becomes a walled garden, basically the same as if you upset a power mod on Reddit and lose access to huge sections of the site, except it’s worse on here because you wouldn’t even be able to lurk.
I guess you could just have multiple accounts, but we could easily see a situation where you need like 10 accounts just to see the most popular instances, which is obviously ridiculous and not practical unless you’re terminally online.
It seems like a pretty huge flaw in the system, to be honest. Theoretically it’s a good idea, but as more and more people flock to the large instances it seems like it’s only a matter of time before the power plays start to happen.
Is there anything at all to stop that happening? It’s seems inevitable to me that eventually the whole thing will fall apart if people abuse the system.
If what you describe is severe enough, that’s a significant disadvantage of being registered on a big instance, and using communities which are hosted on a big instance. Which in turn makes smaller instances and smaller communities more appealing.
I think it’s self-regulating. The transitional period (like the current reddit exodus) is always a bit rough. Long term, things will survive which are fine for all participants.
Worst case, it’s always much easier to move within the fediverse than it is to move between entirely different platforms and ecosystems. Yes, power plays and nasty circumstances are possible, but moving inside the fediverse is so much easier compared to the outside world. And being able to move is a safeguard against bad conditions.