In particular, it seems to me that centralization is almost a law of the universe (or at least a tendency). Lemmy may start decentralized, with dozens or hundreds of meaningfully-sized instances, but it’s easy to imagine a not-far future where most everyone has settled on just a handful of instances (or even just one).
I don’t mean to just be a pessimist here. I’m sure I’m far from the first person to wonder about this, and I’m curious whether there are ideas of how to counterbalance the tendency toward centralization.
Well, I guess email is one counterexample. Though we can all see its issues (spam, overzealous spam filters, complete lack of “feature development”, even though that’s probably a good thing there).
Also, another issue I’m worried about is horizontal scalability. I hope that as communities grow it won’t become cost-prohibitive to run a new instance (as it will have to mirror too much content).
Email isn’t really decentralised since a while anymore:
It’s Decentralised in the protocol, but the spirit of it’s execution isn’t…
While it’s not easy to host email, it’s still possible. There’s still good email providers out there as well. So while it’s not perfect, it’s still better than if it was fully centralized.
I expect roughly the same from Lemmy.
I’m certainly aware of these issues, and wrestle with them regularly, as I still host email myself. That said, my professional stuff is also going through Outlook (my worst enemy as a self hoster, but I can’t really switch right now).
Still, I see it as a positive that with enough resources/time, you can still get into this space, evidenced by all the smaller email providers which still pop up and seem to have pretty good deliverability. It’s just still the best we’ve got. We won’t widely agree on anything better anytime soon, even in more technical circles.
I’ve thought about this too, but consider a situation where Reddit is exactly as they are right now in terms of amount of users, except imagine they were federated.
The moment they try to pull something that upsets their users, instead of causing a big hassle and leading to a massive community diaspora, users could simply switch over to another instance. They would continue using the exact same apps and interacting with the same people, but Reddit as a corporate monolith would simply fade out in favor of something better.
Honestly, I do agree that it’s likely that over time some instance will get too big for its own good, but that problem is so much easier to deal with here.
While I generally agree with you, the problem is, that we already have precedence going in other directions.
Web1 was initially very decentralised. Usenet, static websites hosted on small servers, etc.
Web2 made the internet much more accessible, but people consistently preferred well polished easy to use centralised services instead of the “slow and less UX optimised” decentralised alternatives. Even email isn’t really decentralised today as people don’t boycott (or care about) the big email providers (Microsoft, Google etc.) censoring or blacklisting mailservers outside of their walled garden.
I wish, that the people have made enough bad experiences with web2 to actually understand and care about web3 federation. If they don’t understand why this is necessary and just go from one company to another, then we’ll be doomed to repeat it all again… Let’s see.
Obviously the people already here are slightly biased. It’s a big task to get the Reddit people off and into the Fediverse! But we can do it!
