The fanbase is still large, but the Lemmy community hasn’t quite caught up yet, and now there is a transitional period where the audience is smaller.

  • skomposzczet@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Only thing that bothers me is that most of the biggest communities are @ lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, so it still feels kind of centralized.

    Obviously it’s not, but I wonder if too much “power” in one instance will have some negative consequences in future. For example one of them going black results in losing half of lemmy content and orphaned users probably won’t spread to smaller instances but will join next biggest.

    • TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      This is true, but there are good reasons it’s shaking out this way:

      • Lemmy.world has had some of the most open signups compared to other major instances

      • Discovery of communities across instances is a little harder, specifically natural discovery instead of directly searching

      • It is easier to just tell incoming users to sign on to the instance your community is hosted on because you know it’s safe and they won’t ever be locked out by defederation

      I think the rise of more topic-specfiic instances like ttrpg.network will help spread the load out.

    • Bilbo Baggins@hobbit.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      This is a concern, but luckily this isn’t required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don’t need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.

      To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.

      But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.

        • Bilbo Baggins@hobbit.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          If you’re asking what the $6 gets, I’m talking about a single shard which allows me to host a Linux instance that runs a Lemmy instance. I wasn’t sure if that was sufficient, but honestly, the performance via Jerboa is better than when I was using an account on lemmy.world. It has only been a week, so don’t know how much disk will get used up over time. Long term I might need to bump things up for storage.