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.
If big instances are already defederating from each other then I don’t see how Lemmy can grow like many of us want it to. I mean, now any new user who randomly chooses Lemmy.World as their server is going to get a much worse Lemmy experience and they won’t even be aware of it. (Come to think of it, maybe I’m getting a lesser experience right now because maybe my server defederated from another big server that I’m not aware of.) This seems like a flawed system, or at least it seems like a system that isn’t intended to have much user growth.
You can view exactly who your instance federates with. If the instance is public, the instances that are blocked/allowed are publicly visible. New users probably won’t know what this means… but certainly could after some time/understanding. No reason you shouldn’t know! So let’s fix that.
Your instance chose to block the following instances:
lemmygrad.ml asbestos.cafe eientei.orgBut that only helps in knowing which communities I can see, I still don’t know how much I’m missing out in the comments on other communities because some of them might be from people my instance has defederated.
I noticed this today when I had a comment chain on lemmy.world that I accessed 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 they happen to include a comment from a user somewhere early in the chain that is on an instance which is blocked by my instance.That’s the reason despite me being german I probalby won’t use feddit.de anymore because, at least for the time being, lemm.ee doesn’t have anyone blocked so in this specific example I can at least see everything posted on lemmy.world that isn’t already blocked by lemmy.world itself(in which case I don’t miss out because no one could see these posts).
While with feddit.de, browsing on lemmy.world I also won’t see things blocked by feddit.de that other users browing lemmy.world could see.I don’t think this is necessarily a defederation issue. I’m running a private instance and should not really have been defederated as nothing comes from my instance except 2 users (of which I’m the more vocal of the 2 of us). I run into the problem you outline all the same. My version will show 2 comments, the origin server will show 11. Sometimes even completely different comments and none of the instances show to be blocking me on their /instance page.
I’m not on either feddit.de, lemm.ee, or lemmy.world’s lists. I still run into this.
What I think is going on is simply hiccups in federation. Instances where one of the instances misses sending an ActivityPub message to all parties and that’s it.
But let’s even say that I am currently defederated. From my understanding this is a temporary measure until stuff settles down a bit.
Well in my case it’s perfectly clear that the problem was defederation because the comments I was able to see with my feddit instance were all there precisely up to the point where a person from lemmy.fmhy.ml, an instance that is blocked on feddit, posted something and everything that was in context of that post was gone when viewed from feddit.
Reddit isn’t totally free of this problem (feature) either–You can have multiple subreddits dedicated to the same topic.
IMO while the federated communities might feel fragmented if you are used to reddit, it’s the main benefit of using Lemmy and something that should be embraced. Concentrating content into only a few instances defeats the point of federation.
Take the current issue as an example: A gigantic community defederated from another gigantic community leading to a comparatively large wall between the content of those communities. Had they been smaller, the impact of this issue would therefore also be smaller. This affects other communities which get content from beehaw as well, since there’s now less interaction between a large portion of the fediverse user base.
It’s only natural that large communities will bubble to the top however, and there probably isn’t a good answer to how to ‘balance out’ those communities, or if that’s even beneficial at all.
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.
I think a lot of issues with federation can be solved with improving the code. Lemmy is still a very new product.
Beehive blacklisted Lemmy.world? Mhm and that’s why we need decentralised instances. I don’t care about how beehive views Lemmy world as I can access still both as I am from an entirely different instance :)
