domination is inevitable

I was on beehaw until they defederated, just seemed like the wrong answer to me and one that will just end up being damaging to Lemmy, especially the way they went about it.

Same. I don't mind a few words to try and convince someone I'm not a bot but it should still be a semiautomatic system (e.g. auto-approve after a few hours if you don't get explicitly denied). I think approvals simply got backed up because 1 or 2 ppl were approving these and it suddenly turned into thousands of applications per hour.

I heard you have to personally fellate the beehaw admins to get approved.

But they do want your email address. Even Reddit didn't require that.

but their goals are not realistic if they want to be a platform of any significant size.

As I understand it, they don't care about being big, they care about having a community of people that align to their principles.

Problem is, if you don't pay too much attention to their server description, you might not realize what their principles are.

I think they got so big because many people were just trying to join any instance under the massive influx, without thinking much about it, and beehaw became much bigger than they intended to be (or expected).

Now that they have defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, people "not intended" to be there are leaving, that should bring them "more down" than they currently are, I think that's what they actually want.

also because it seems sustainable with the donations and Ruud is a gigachad

Kbin.social user chiming in here! I haven't checked out Lemmy but I'm content with what kbin offers me so far.

I’ve been unable to get the sign up process to finish on Lenny.world. Fill out the fields and the submit button just spins forever.

Thing is, as long as it's not possible to merge similar communities from different instances, large instances are actually preferable from a User uxperience point of view.

It’s gotta start somewhere though. It makes sense that as refugees flock over they’ll gravitate towards the largest instance, because the expectation is that’s where the usage is and they don’t yet grok how the Fediverse works. As they settle in, I’d expect a number of them to spread out a bit. Once we can migrate accounts I’d expect the load to be distributed even better.

Rather, more instances, not servers. An instance can scale out using as many servers as the owner can tolerate.

I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one managing a horizontally scaled fediverse instance on a cloud platform though, that shit adds up fast, and no way in hell is anyone going to donate here.

I honestly don’t get how that’s supposed to work indefinitely, that’s usually where ad money comes in and… god dammit we’re back to square one lol. I’m here for a good time, not a long time 😎

There will be both. I think many will appreciate the simplicity of large instances.

I'm betting that is going to occur with growing out communities. They will probably have disagreement with admin then move or just want a more focused community that people can click local & get what they want.

We have to see people show up, learn, and start to enjoy it. A big instance has some perks for the time being and everyone might want to see its sticking power before dealing with headache of running their own instance.

That's total users tho, I think OP is referring to lemmy.world users only.

This is so exciting, each day I feel more and more at home in the fediverse

I think that will be a lot more feasible if the capability to migrate user accounts between instances is added.

Right now for a new user joining the fediverse, the largest instances are the best option since they are the most likely to remain up and federated with most other instances. Why would you join some random smaller instance when there’s a clearly established one already there?

Making it possible to change instances would remove some of this friction - then your choice of initial instance isn’t important.

I think federation wars will cause that end point. If I wanted to start a community- or group of communities- I’d put them on their own instance and not have user signups. That minimizes exposure to conflict - either you like sports communities / Pathfinder communities / whatever or you don’t. If beehaw wants to lock themselves down it doesn’t affect my community. If Lemmy.world gets blocked by a bunch of instances it doesn’t affect my community. I don’t have to deal with the consequences on other instances of users coming from my instance.

I’d go a step further and say that identity management should exist separately from content, but that would probably break brains already struggling with the concept of federation.

We are all in this together.

Yeah, I also like my small instance (BTW: donate to your instances!) I really hope that each instance ends up with like, one dominant community, so the traffic gets spread out and doesn't accidentally crush anything

I firstly signed at lemmy.ml, then kbin and then lemmy.world.
I found kbin more convenient personally for pc use, but both are beautiful and evolving.

This is what it gives me if I try signing in with the credentials of another server. I made accounts on a few before I realized what was what.

Good to know! Hope my login cookie doesn't expire 😬

Oh that's very interesting. I'm having an identical issue with an account I made on another Lemmy instance (feddit.uk). I'm still trying to work out where I'll settle long-term (including whether that is on Kbin or Lemmy) but for the time being the inability to access my feddit.uk account is making the decision for me...

Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world. So anything that a lemmy.world user posts on any instance in the fediverse will be invisible to beehaw users. Any posts made on the beehaw instance won’t be updated to lemmy.world users after defederation. The local “cached” version of various beehaw communities still exists on the lemmy.world instance, so we can view that and comment/post/vote there. However all that activity stays on our instance and is invisible to any users from all other instances.

In practical terms, it means we can’t participate in any beehaw communities. We can see posts made by beehaw users on other instances (say a comment by a beehaw user in a lemmy.ml community), but the beehaw user won’t see any posts made by a lemmy.world user.

It means we can't see/talk to them, and vice versa. You may still see old beehaw posts and comments, that were already cached on our side, and can even interact with them, but none of that data will make it to them

Everything on Kbin and Lemmy is "federated"

This is basically just a fancy word to say "no matter what server you're on, we can all talk to each other".

It's kind of like E-Mail where no matter if you use GMail or Outlook, you can talk to your friends and colleagues.

When a server defederates from another server, It's like a two-way block.

People on (in this case) beehaw won't see threads, magazines and replies from Lemmy.world and sh.it just.works and people from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won't see threads, magazines and replies from beehaw.org

Server/Instance admins usually do this when there are instances which spread unwished for content.

This is also why on my profile, there's a link (forum.fail). It's part of my identifier here on the Fediverse (@[email protected]).

It stopped receiving posts or comments from other instances like lemmy.world. Their reasoning is that they want a highly moderated "safe" instance, but since moderation tools are still very primitive, they decided to defederate, it was easier than trying to moderate posts from the big instances. They said they will re-federate once mod tools improve.

They split off to be their own little island