big instances are more likely to stay up. smaller instances may just be some random user who might not be as interested in maintaining the site and may end up closing it. this happened to me when I used mastodon, I joined a smaller instance and they ended up shutting down.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

100%. The best instance to be on is actually your own. Failing that, a small one where the admins are easy to get a hold of.

Big ones that offer extra goodies might become a thing ala Gmail, but I expect they will vet and monitor their users so nobody has to block them.

Edit: Annoyingly, I can't respond to Kbin users,

[–] arkcom@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

At some point they will change to whitelist, which will ban all single user instance as well.

[–] JWBananas@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The root problem is that identity is tied to an instance at all. For a federated system, the lack of federated identity / single sign on is baffling.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

Well, it's unfortunate, but it's not baffling. It's quite understandable that there's no single sign-on for a system like this.

If you want to have both decentralization and a shared "identity" across all of the decentralized servers then you're probably going to need something like a blockchain to accomplish that. But people are already complaining about how complicated the Fediverse is, so adding a blockchain into the backbone will likely be challenging to pull off. Not to mention the knee-jerk reaction a lot of people have to the word "blockchain" or "cryptocurrency" regardless of what the actual practical application of it might be.

[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

Hard disagree. You're stating a subjective opinion about the experience you want to have as a hard fact about the experience everyone else should have. You don't get to tell other people what they like.

Being on an instance that is well-moderated without you having to do that work yourself is one of the selling points of fedi apps. I am sure a huge number of people who signed up on Beehaw wanted exactly this.

[–] atypicaloddity@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

There's a possible future where major fediverse sites switch to whitelisted federation to deal with spam etc. At that point, your small instance would have to petition all the major players to be let in. That would probably kill off most small instances.

[–] Frz@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

My biggest fear is if some corpos decide to set up mega instances and start dominating Lemmy by doing this, since corpos probably have the best budgets to set up massive server infrastructure. I think the more Lemmy grows the more attention it’ll get from corpos, which is not great.

[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 years ago

The alternative is already corpo owned from the start. The nice thing with Lemmy is that a server can choose to federate or not that said corpo owned federated server.

Big corpos will always try to get their greasy hands on anything that they feel can make them money. But at least we have tools to not see those servers if so is the wish.

[–] gonzo0815@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago

I can imagine that something like approval instances make sense. Larger instances could connect to these to automatically federate with all the small instances that get approved by them. If an approval instance doesn't handle spam well, large instances could still defedarate.

[–] Aesthesiaphilia@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

it's extremely useful to newbies and less tech-savvy people who don't know how to find communities on other instances
at the current moment when federation is still a bit wonky due to the influx of new members, it's good to have the bulk of content you want to see be on your own instance. I can't login to lemmy.world, but I can log into kbin. But until recently I was only able to see posts 5 hours old on other instances from kbin.

[–] Frz@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 years ago

True. The larger the instance the more likely some other user has already searched a community that you’re interested in, so the more results you’ll probably get through your instance’s native search. One way I’ve found to get around it is sites like lemmyverse.net, but it can be a bit inconvenient to use a separate site for your search engine, then paste the link back in to the native search feature.