Most people access the Fediverse through one of the large instances: lemmy.world, kbin, or beehaw. New or small instances of Lemmy have no content by default, and can most easily get content by linking to larger Lemmy instances. This is done manually one “Community” at a time (I spent 15 minutes doing this yesterday). Meanwhile, on larger instances, content naturally aggregates as a result of the sheer number of users. Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it’s inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances. It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.

I actually think the Fediverse is in the beginning the process of fragmenting into siloed smaller, centralized instances. Beehaw, which is on the list of top instances, just blacklisted everyone from lemmy.world. Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other. It is possible that this fragmentation and instability? of Lemmy instances will kill the viability of Federated Reddit altogether, but hopefully not.

These are my main takeaways from my three days on the Fediverse. I will stick around to see if the Fediverse can sustain itself after the end of the Reddit blackouts.

  • b0b89@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    I’m on a smallish lemmy instance and I just click “All” and I can see stuff from the bigger ones. Don’t really see what the issue is.

    • Ado@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Big issue is that random posts flood your feed when it’s on that mode. Hope that can change soon

    • trachemys@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      1 year ago

      All will only show you communities that some other user on your instance has already subscribed to. If you really are on an empty instance, All will be pretty empty. Not that it is a bad thing. I can use All on lemmy.world if I want to explore new communities.