Incredible to think about that we got it right the first time (with email) and still had to spend the last 20 years complaining about centralized social networks.
That is why it’s important to also use other software than Lemmy like Mbin or Piefed. Users want choice and the Fediverse is only as decentralized as the software running on it. So please, think about this.
I dont think its the software* but the instance that matters. Everyone being on lw is not good (not that there is anything wrong with lw, just that centralization is bad). Thankfully most lemmy apps nowadays default to lemm.ee which should hopefully counter most of the centralization. Lemmy apps should rotate the default server when it gets too big which will help a lot (also shows the impact defaults have).
*Software would have mattered if the main devs instance was also the biggest. Or a very popular lemmy client defaulted to their own instance. With lemmy thats not the case.
Great point. If defaults didn’t matter Google wouldn’t have spent billions of dollars buying the default search position on other browsers.
I do not agree with you. Yes I’m a developer myself of Mbin. And I created Mbin. However, the problem with decentralization is that you still need to trust the developers who are building the decentralized apps. So within a decentralized ecosystem the centralized point are the developers and its project.
If you do not agree with Lemmy, you can go to Mbin. And visa versa; if you do not agree with Mbin devs, you can go to Lemmy, etc. Meaning you do need to have alternatives, otherwise choice is an illusion and decentralization is also an illusion.
~ Melroy, Mbin developer.
Big fan of mbin,
I’m sure this has been asked before, but do you plan on adding support for lemmy’s api? Lemmy really has the edge in apps.
There’s !interstellar@kbin.earth
Exactly, Mbin has Interstellar. And Mbin also has an API, since that is what Interstellar is using.
I think a surefire way to help with this would be to have a rule that any instance that becomes the largest one on Lemmy should lock itself instantly. That way, we’ll only surpass the current max number of users on a single instance until it’s completely spread out
This sounds neat, I kinda like this
I would suggest giving it a smallish margin so that it wouldn’t get annoying with two similarly sized instances.
Fair point
I’m not sure the smaller Lemmy servers running on a pi or resident internet upload could handle the equal sizable fraction of .world . it would be interesting to calculate how many users total on Lemmy divided by how many public joinable instances and see the averages or which servers are forced to scale the most.
This would take away complete user freedom to choose the server they want which is controversial.
Also, have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active and count the number of non-LW communities in the top 20
Ironically, !fediverse@lemmy.zip could also be an alternative to this community.
@coffeeadmin@lemmy.coffee , have you considered crossposting there?
I think piefeds combined view makes this less of an issue. Like people subscribe to/post in the big communities because they are more active so get more comments and stuff. But in piefed you get the combined discussion from all the communities so you get the same experience even if you are subscribed to a less popular community on that topic.
Feeds are awesome 😎
Ex: https://piefed.social/f/fediversevideos
Allows you to sub to many fediverse account/communities/etc…
Piefed feeds do not solve technical delay between LW and aussie.zone
Piefed feeds do not solve technical delay between LW and aussie.zone
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I really do want to point out, Gmail is gonna get a massive lead as time goes on.
Doing parental consent forms for my schools library, most of the parents email were yahoo, Hotmail, etc. but EVERY SINGLE student email was Gmail, with the exception of like 10 out of (at least) 300 pages(edit: to clarify, 300 pages is 300 emails)
There really is no competitor to Google Drive’s online collaborative document and slideshow editing right now. Apple and Microsoft have made some weak attempts but until their software works fully in a browser and is 100% free to get started, it won’t catch on. It not just about email.
mega is good, in my experience.
I meant the productivity suite not just file sharing. I edited my comment to try to make it clearer.
Been on Gmail since it was invite only. It really is best in class. Hate on Google all ya like, but they got a lock on email early in the game.
And for those that think getting away from it is a matter of choosing another email provider, I’ll say that Gmail does loads more than deliver email. Authentication is a huge and obvious use. Reading comments around here leads me to believe that many don’t understand Google for Business and how integrated an org can be with those services.
Another note, just because the domain isn’t gmail.com doesn’t mean it isn’t served by Google. For most companies it would be insane to host their own services and cheaper to let Google handle it all.
The raw SMTP landscape on the internet is such a shitshow. Setting up a SMTP server requires so many goddamn condoms that you might as well just give up and start using some other professional email service. Or you set it up just to forward email to a GMail account, and even then, Gmail bitches about how much spam you’re forwarding it and blocks you for a time.
That’s because these students were brain washed on that garbage.
I wonder how much of that has to do wtih chromebooks.
Android seems far more likely cause.
It’ll probably follow Zipf’s law, like most things.
Okay, based on that article Zipf’s law seems to mostly apply to languages. Cities, for example, don’t follow it.
It shows up when choosing things. Most people will choose the largest, some will choose the next largest, etc. I might be wrong, of course.
Zipf’s law is just a specific example of a power law. Other power laws exist for lots of different things, just with different exponents.
the jury seems out about cities. This paper suggests they don’t follow a other distributions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275124002592 , but this one suggests that they do: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2013/12/on-city-size-distribution_g17a2442/5k3tt100wf7j-en.pdf - specifically it suggests they DO follow Zipf’s law, within a given country. Inter-country differences are likely due to different developmental trajectories over time.
The thing about email is that the software is proprietary. Each of these providers has their own implementation of the interface, features, and integration with their tools (Google drive, photos, etc).
As long as lemmy servers run lemmy software, this won’t happen, or at least won’t be an issue as you can move to another server and not have to change your usage habits.
However if some server owners decide to fork Lemmy and develop their proprietary server, overhaul the UI, add features and attract users, it will start to become a problem.
Email had standardized protocols and clients for 50 years, and still does.
Most people just use the web interface
Maybe you do.
They didn’t use to, anyway.
But also what you’re describing is a solved problem and you’d think it’d be nice for you to learn that.
email is a standard protocol. You can run your own server using FOSS software in 5 minutes if you start now. One of the biggest problems is that you will have a hard time “federating” to gmail and others due to the spam problematic, but that is something that we will see with Lemmy, too. Currently I can spin up my own server and start pushing shit to lemmy.world and other bigger instances, but I feel that this will change with the coming spam waves
Lemmy’s AGPL license doesnt allow forking the code into a proprietary server. All changes need to be open source as well, otherwise the operator can get sued. So a proprietary Lemmy software would have to be developed from scratch which would take a long time.
Lemmy uses activityPub, and open protocol for social networking.
Piefed and mbin are both open source, and interoperate with lemmy.
Lemmy.world, lemm.ee.
federation and the concept of communities have always been a little awkward together since it’s based on sunreddits where there is only one always.
The only ways this pans out is with having one server where the community is most successful to eat up the others or having like two or three who hate each other
It really just depends on how users have to choose a service and how much it matters. With email the service used doesn’t really matter so most either use what is given to them (here that’s often from their ISP) or what is recomended to them (e.g. Gmail or Hotmail here in the EU)
As long as nothing dominates I am ok with it
Looks like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
For fucks sake, have the 0 at the twelve o clock position and not this horrible mess. This ruins one’s day.
By how easily you’re offended, your day was probably going to be ruined anyway.
I kinda like it. The off-centered main line allows labels to be written easier.
That pie chart isnt including trust.
If I see a Hotmail/yahoo email, I immediately assume spammer or nontechnical boomer who has already been scammed a few times.
Lemmy instances have similar stigmas
