I get the idea of instances, like you can make your own and this is good for privacy. But some lemmy instances are much more popular and this in fact makes it another Reddit. If there are separate instances for niche topics, why not make it another community inside a larger instance?
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Actual answer? Who knows…
MY answer, because instance operator/server can establish whatever rules they want, and aren’t beholden to a CEO, shareholders, or any other entity that might want to put 50 ads on your feed for every post…
Because it’s open source and the community apparently wants it to stay that way.
Lemmy is a federated social network, similar to Mastodon, where anyone can create and run their own instance. This means it’s not centrally controlled by one entity. The reasons for having many instances include:
1. Decentralization: This reduces the power of any single entity over the entire network and prevents any central point of failure. If one instance goes down, others are unaffected. This design also helps resist censorship because content moderation is handled individually by each instance.
2. Community autonomy: Each instance can form its own unique community with its own rules and norms. This can promote diversity of thought and freedom of expression, as different communities can have different standards and policies.
3. Privacy and security: Having separate instances can provide a higher degree of privacy and security. The admin of an instance only has access to data from their instance, not the entire network.
Regarding the concern of popular instances becoming like Reddit, it’s worth noting that decentralization inherently provides a counterbalance. If an instance becomes too dominant or its policies become unpopular, users can migrate to or create a new instance. In the end, the federated nature of Lemmy allows for a much more democratic and user-driven online community.
If an instance becomes too dominant, users actually love it.
Example: Lemmy.world :)
Part of it is figuring out how to pay for all the servers. If we have 1000 instances instead of 100, more people pay a smaller amount for server maintenance. If everyone uses a single instance, who pays for it?
That’s especially a problem since people absolutely don’t want to see ads, they don’t like the idea of a coin/reward system, and generally don’t contribute (less than 1 out of 20 ppl donate, and that’s being generous)
For what it’s worth, once you get to the single user level, the cost is pretty much nil assuming you have the hardware and domain already
Nice! I have neither; how much’ll it run me?
Well you can get a domain with a weird TLD for $2-5 a year and $40-80 once for a SBC like a raspberry pi to run it. Ideally you’d want a small 32-64gb ~$20 SSD or HDD for storage, but in a pinch a USB stick or micro SD card that you can get for ~$5 would do. Any old computer can handle it though, Lemmy is pretty lightweight, you would have resources left over on the host to run other services. So in total if you wind up in over $100 something went wrong somewhere.
Some people want instances which align with them ideologically
Lol I joined for the piracy, then I see the sidebar linking the Anarchist Code of Conduct and I just felt so… liberating.
We know who are those vocal crazy minorities, don’t we
Except it’s not a minority? Maybe you didn’t shop around for an instance, but most fediverse users do.
I’d think that most OG lemmy users were people like that, so it’s not “small”
In addition to what the others have said, we’ve lost some big and popular instances (Vlemmy, FMHY and others) along with the communities they had. Also, with the 2 biggest (lemmy.world and lemmy.ml) coming under attack every week, some users want to be on a smaller instance that’s under the radar.
Finally, people want to choose an instance that fits their interests/beliefs. I chose mine mainly for what they don’t allow and who they’re defederated from, but to each his own.
I chose mine because it’s one of the very few that gives the users decision making power by allowing them to vote on decisions.
What happened to vlemmy, FMHy etc?
vlemmy disappeared a few weeks ago with out a trace or any explanation. FMHY’s domain was confiscated by the government of Mali.
Think of it like email.
Every email provider has different pros and cons. You might have switched from Hotmail to Gmail so that you dont have to delete emails every week because you’ve run out of space again. You might later switch to protonmail so that you could get some more privacy instead.
Likewise, you can choose an instance based on your specific needs and preferences. If you want to be in a communist echo chamber, there’s more than one instance for you. If you care about something else, there’s probably an instance for you somewhere out there. If not, you can make a special instance for all the furries who enjoy playing polo, eating banana pizza and listening to trip hop.
Funny domain
We still haven’t really sussed out whether the dominant model is going to be general or specific focus instances, or even brought whether niche boards want to just be in charge of the content and not the users, since your credentials are good everywhere you’re federated.
Right now your ‘all’ feed is a combination of all the various places users on your instance have trawled, but they’re not totally the same everywhere.
We could see curated instance feeds with some instance muting from admins that make it function like a public RSS, per user even if it gets that granular. Skies kind of the limit once you understand it’s limited to insecure communication, the most anonymity you have here is in a crowd.
This is one of my favourite things about lemmy. It’s resilient. You can always find new places, new communities, new posts on different instances. It really feels like traversing the web like in Reboot. I like so many instances.
Afaik it’s to spread out the load.
A single instance means they have all the load, just like Reddit.
Load leveling. Specific policies. More control and performance, if it’s your own instance.
Say you want to control whether your posts get deleted or not. On someone else’s instance, it’s up to them.
We need to see the whole context here. We are the ones who grew up watching how corporation’s advertisement-driven and centralized model of internet took over the wild west that was before the 2000s. Internet access wasn’t widespread before that and it consisted of many separate and independent websites, each ran by its owner, with a small but tight community of people, usually around their own forum.
It’s a “going back to the internet’s roots” kind of movement. Thus, self-hosting (as it used to be) and decentralization (while also introducing modern innovations such as ActivitiesPub) is romanticized. And because Lemmy has only recently started growing in popularity, we are at the stage where there is a plethora of selfhosted small instances in a chaotic way. It’s like watching solar system formation in an astronomical scale - first you have the matter spread out everywhere but most eventually concentrate around big spheres. I presume the same will happen here too, but the Federation model we’re adopting will also leave the door for small scale independent communities to thrive too.
I agree with thi
