Centralization is a product of social behavior. People will gravitate to the place everyone else is. They won’t “decentralize” naturally.
Comment on Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy.
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 6 months agoIt’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.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 6 months ago
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
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.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
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, I can’t predict the future.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
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.
Blaze@dormi.zone 6 months ago
Here is a dashboard of synchronisation time between the most popular instances: …lem.rocks/…/federation-health-time-behind?orgId=…
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)