There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a little centralization in your federation. It works well enough for email. The point is that you have the option, not that you have to use it.
You don’t have to trade one extreme for the other. In fact, I think this is the perfect example of that. Lemmy.ml is the developers’ instance, and by default would likely be the largest. Except… you know. Many, many people started there before going to other instances, especially the largest competitor.
The issue is that the kid that owns the ball sets the rules. LW could do something heinous, and the only choices would be to cope or lose half the Fediverse.
You mean like if they went all tankie? Or like AOL email? This has already happened several times before and it’s fine. Google could kill gmail in six months and we’d all move on.
I’ve run into issues where information I want access to just doesn’t exist anymore because of the Reddit fiasco. The people that did that were a small minority of Reddit, and Reddit as a whole was basically unaffected by the protest after it was quashed.
Imagine the type of chaos it would cause if it came out that the LW admins were getting a corporate kickback to destabilize the Fediverse, or that they were involved in some other equally shady enterprise. It would probably be the end of the Fediverse, either through the created schisms or the lack of will to stop the corporate meddling. It would at least cause massive instability and make us look bad to users who would otherwise think of joining. A lot of information would probably be lost as people tried to push back. I’m sure a lot of people just wouldn’t have the willpower to move their communities elsewhere and there would be a significant number of people supporting the admins’ actions through apathetic inaction.
The thing is that the value is in the communities and not in the old content. So most likely the mods would just post we move to a new instance and a lot of users would follow. We just saw that on the German speakin lemmy instance feddit.de, which was abandoned and now most of the users and communities moved to feddit.org, which is already one of the larger ones.
What lemmy really needs is the ability to easily move accounts and communities. Mastodon has that for users already.
everyone goes to the most popular one because they think that’s the one with all the things on it that’s how the internet works that’s what everyone’s doing
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