Wary Jerryis anyone aware of metrics about the longevity of Fediverse instances by size? I read a diatribe today about how Lemmy/threadiverse is too centralized, lobbying for people to participate in communities on smaller instances. It’s also a common bit of advice given on places like Reddit that people should join small mastodon instances or self host. I think at some level the mastodon guidance has disenfranchised a lot of people who ended up on instances that went belly up, many of which were smaller. But not exclusively so. I think it’s a lot more problematic in the threadiverse for a few reasons: first, most of the software does not permit account migration; second, when the instance that a community resides on goes away, that community effectively goes away along with the future ability to participate in it. Said another way, I think threadiverse users have a vested interest in picking both instances and communities hosted on instances that have some staying power, at least with how things work today. Perhaps there are better ways to structure things so there is much less reliance on an instance, but that clearly is not the case today.
I have this intuition that small instances tend to be set up as somewhat noncommittal hobby projects. Now I’m not advocating that things should be more centralized, just that the way things are seem to create a lot of challenges for the lay person who just wants to use the threadiverse and have it just work.
Anyhow, that’s just today’s shower thought.
jandi
Tim Chambers
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