I found it complicated at first (didn’t know which instance “will last”, where to register to not lose anything when instance admin decide to turn it down), but now it’s going good. We are missing mobile apps though.
What’s are your thoughts about Lemmy/kbin?
honestly, once I wrapped my head around the idea of federation (which is very easy given I’ve been active in the P2P torrent field before- federation is but a simple extension of that concept) lemmy has pretty easy to use. It’s simple. The interface is clean and has what I want right in front. I search what I want, deal with a couple minor bugs, and then look at what I want to look at.
My only biggest concern with Lemmy longterm is community fragmentation. As more instances spin up with the user influx, and Lemmy being (currently) limited in horizontal scaling of individual instances, we are going to have cases of tens, maybe even hundreds, of instances all ending up with identical, but separate, communities. Federation of a single instance’s community can only work so well, if we’re expecting users in the millions, and such fragmented communities that may or may not end up federating with one another can artificially make the service feel a lot less active than it really is and/or potentially lead to a lot of content being missed by some users.
Good point, valid concern! I hope existing (real) communities (from existing subreddits or elsewhere) can have leaders pointing users to a specific Feddit community. What would be even more awesome, is if communities could be merged: that way we could ‘repair’ in a sense, fragmentation that happened naturally without losing the users and content that one of the communities already amassed.
If something like multi-reddit comes about in Lemmy, I believe it could solve that issue. Just make a multi-reddit of what is the same community (roughly) over multiple servers. It won’t solve the problem of duplicate posts though. But Reddit had the same issue at times, where multiple subreddits for the same topic existed, although generally it merged down into a single subreddit that was actually useful.
Ah - interesting point. So you’re saying scaling limitations could arise if a particular community (akin to a Reddit ‘sub’) gets big enough to outgrow one instance. I wonder if multi-instance federated communities will become a possibility.
Isn’t this partially intentional? If you don’t like the moderation or community or one instance, you can join a community with the same name on a different instance. I don’t know how it works out in practice, but this should reduce the power of moderators who hang around forever without actually moderating.
There are benefits to it, but it naturally limits maximum community size since it will be a problem if any community significantly outscales the instance it is from. I don’t see an easy way around it, it likely needs a better hosting/funding solution for the servers that support the “big” communities.