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Also, consider going past the first page on FediDB and picking a smaller instance. I'm not knocking the big instances (I volunteer my time to two of the biggest, after all). It's just that the whole point of this Fediverse experiment is for things to be distributed. Going by the numbers on FediDB, fully half of all monthly active Lemmy users are concentrated on the three largest instances.
I strongly disagree with this. This point is that it CAN be distributed, not that it needs to be.
That's like saying the whole point of making divorce legal is so that everybody gets divorced. It's the option that's the important bit.
Why not go to Discuit and their 194 weekly active users if you want a fully centralized initiative?
As much as federeation gets criticized on Lemmy (and to be fair, it brings some issues), the numbers still show that Lemmy is the most successful Reddit alternative. By far.
But if the fediverse isn't actually distributed, then you don't actually have the option, right? If 80% of activity is on one server, then that server effectively controls the fediverse, and if you have a problem with their admins or moderators, you don't have a viable alternative.
If it's not actually distributed, the fact that it theoretically could be doesn't really matter. And this isn't even mentioning the possibility of a centralized server having technical or legal issues.
The divorce analogy is not a good one because that's an individual decision, whereas migrating servers and communities is not something that one individual person can just suddenly choose to do. It requires time, effort, and collective action, so it's better to be pre-emptively distributed to eliminate that vulnerability in the first place.
Is that still true with easy export? It sounds like that server effectively controls the fediverse until it doesn't.
What do you mean by easy export? I haven't been keeping up with recent Lemmy updates because SJW is still running 0.19.5.
But if that's some way to transfer your account to another server, that helps a little bit, but the more difficult thing is to migrate the communities to a new server. AFAIK you would have to start the communities from scratch with 0 posts and 0 subscribers, and that takes a long time to build back up.
Can be done in a few days if you warn the community beforehand and keep them informed where to go.
!sideoftheroad@lemmy.today is a good recent example from !sideoftheroad@possumpat.io