If everyone was spread out onto different instances, and communities were based all over the fediverse, the decisions of one instance would be less impactful.
I think once adding communities from outside your instance becomes a little easier we'll see that. A lot of newcomers had some trouble figuring out how federation works and went where a lot of the activity was
There’s also the fact that a bunch of instances immediately closed registration as soon as the Reddit refugees started arriving. They couldn’t handle the sudden extra load, so they all closed their registrations. Which is their right as owners, but it also meant that virtually all the new users were funneled to the instances that were willing to expand, with Lemmy.World being one of the only ones.
Hell, I still haven’t received registration emails for most of the “we’re filtering our registrations. Click the link in your email to verify you aren’t a bot” instances I tried to register with.
I use the 'official' Jerboa app and the web interface and duuude is it a Hassle to add a sole unknown community!
I'm doing them all for what I know ; pasting different link types into jerboa search, pasting the instance, !first, /c/ ... Going to web UI, doing the same, doing the lemmy.mysite.com/c/other@thatinstance.com or what the correct thing is (I have it somewhere) and obviously it still doesn't work.
For like 30 minutes.
Then it "just works" 😅
It would be great if admins at least (I can see the possible abuse if anyone can force-feed communities to the instance, but well they can today so..
) can add communities to their instances by some "add-list" the server grabs quickly (I know we can by subbing to them but see above, it sure is not easy). Could be cool to be able to grab a bunch of fun communities, or art communities, or sport communities or whatever someone shares, and just force feed them to your instance.
I thought whitelisting was something along those lines, I sure was surprised 🙂.
Great job though Lemmy Developers, I'm quite sure Lemmy will roam the internet for ever!
It would be great if admins at least (I can see the possible abuse if anyone can force-feed communities to the instance, but well they can today so..) can add communities to their instances (I know we can, by subbing to them but see above, it sure is not easy).
Isn't that how Lemmy's all feed works? If someone else subscribes to an outside community it shows up under everyone's all tab?
On the other hand, the way we socialise with strangers inherently benefits from centralisation. There's a good reason everyone will intuitively go to the largest instance: it's where everyone else is.
To alleviate that, you'd need to blur the lines enough for it to no longer be visible even. All communities behave as if they're local and so on.