this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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It's definitely not ideal to be this centralized around lemmy.world. But it's also nearly impossible to prevent some amount of centralization, especially at our current size. With only 50k active users, we don't have enough people to sustain activity if things were more spread out.
It's still so early. If we get to 500k or 5M users, things will naturally get way more decentralized. A year ago, about 70-80% of the whole network was basically centralized on lemmy.ml. I dont have the exact numbers because I wasn't here yet, but looking back at the stats there were only a few thousand active users at that time and the vast majority were on lemmy.ml
Now, only about 40% of the network is on lemmy.world (20k/50k users). I just think there are natural incentives that will continue to push us in the direction of decentralization, but we haven't quite reached the tipping point where that starts to happen.
What makes you think that? I abandoned my kbin account because all the content is on lemmy and I don't feel like waiting 4 hours to get that content on kbin. People will go where the content is.
That's just because kbin doesn't work properly though. One reason why things are centralized is because there are only so many servers that actually work well.
Events like this removal of the piracy community will naturally cause people to spread out over time. You could even see people try to spread out on reddit by making new subs when they chafed at the rules.
The more people we have, the more diverse we will become, and thus it will be necessary to create new servers to accommodate these different types of people. That's my instinct, but there are many different ways it could go.
Content loads just as fast on small subs as on large subs. Not so for instances. I think centralization is inevitable unless federated data transfer gets faster.
It usually is federated quickly within Lemmy itself. I can't speak for kbin but in my experience on SJW, I typically get all the content from remote instances in real time.
I know there are some technical issues with the scaling of federation though, but hopefully that can be improved on.
Here is a dashboard of synchronisation time between the most popular instances: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/cdfzs0dwal3pca/federation-health-time-behind?orgId=1&var-instance=All&var-remote_instance=aussie.zone&var-remote_instance=lemmy.blahaj.zone&var-remote_instance=lemmy.ml&var-remote_instance=lemmy.nz&var-remote_instance=reddthat.com&var-remote_instance=sh.itjust.works&var-remote_instance=slrpnk.net&var-remote_software=All&from=now-12h&to=now
As you can see, the only three instances synchronizing in more than 5 minutes are
For the 3 first instances, this is due to lag and centralization of communities on LW. Moving communities away from LW would actually help solving that issue (in parallel, Reddthat is planning to open an EU server to reduce the lag)
Are these all lemmy clients?
Lemmy instances. The graph shows how long it takes for content to go from one instance to another, which is a few minutes at most
Gotcha. Makes me wish I had the technical know how to spin up my own instance. Those really are like subreddits then.
To be fair, for most people it is better to just use a another instance. Instance maintenance can take quite some time
Huh, that's too bad about feddit.ch, at least they have a good alternative in feddit.de I suppose.
Good info btw 👌
And jlai.lu for the French speakers!
And feddit.it also!
Centralization is a product of social behavior. People will gravitate to the place everyone else is. They won't "decentralize" naturally.
Sometimes people centralize, and sometimes they decentralize. They are both natural social behaviors.
If people naturally gravitate to the place everyone is, why are we all on Lemmy instead of reddit? Why do I have absolutely no desire to be a part of lemmy.world, where everyone else is? People are not all the same.