this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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But honestly, social media naturally benefits from everyone being around the biggest totem pole. It means we can randomly run into people and topics and communities that we never knew we wanted to engage with.
If we decentralize, we need an already established community-web, or a very specific plan for which to find in the future. Plus, I'll be honest, between Mastodon, Lemmy and (now) Firefish, I can say that finding communities on the fediverse is annoying in all the right ways to make someone just go back to Twitter/Reddit. I can't blame people for not wanting to engage with that.
But, importantly: Most users being on a huge central instance solves that problem. Yeah it goes against "the spirit of the fediverse". But for the user, it has effectively only upsides.
But you'll still see all content from every federated instance in your feed? It doesn't matter which one you're signed up to.
You may need to search for the community first for your instance to know about it. That hampers discovery a lot imo.
Oh is that true? So when I search for an instance on the app I use (Connect) is the list of communities that appear only there because people have subscribed to them once? Or am I seeing everything but it won't appear in everyone's feed until I subscribe to it?
There is nearly no benefit of being on the largest instance. In fact many would benefit from a smaller instance.
Playing devil advocate, here : you can expect the life expectancy of bigger instances to be slightly to significantly bigger, if anything because their admins feel more responsibility due to the number of users depending on them. That argument does not hold if we're comparing using a big instance vs self-hosting, though (the life-expectancy of your self hosted instance may be smaller, but if you shut it down it means you're not interested anymore in the fediverse, so no big deal - except maybe for the holes you leave behind you). And anyway, I'm not sure better life expectancy is more important than making sure the fediverse stays decentralized.