If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
And that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen. Instance wars and eventual defederation and fragmentation are important moderation tools, and will progress the culture and feel of instances and regions of the Fediverse. Many instances will form federated cliques that are highly connected and have similar vibes and cultures, and some will be federated with multiple cliques, showing users a variety of cultures and situations.
If the Fediverse reaches a large enough number of people, it can support multiple independant cliques, and enable users see entire mini-universes with different communities and vibes.
imma have undercover alts everywhere for the sole purpose of getting all the cats communities in one page.
A man or sheer will and and an unhealthy amount of love for cat photos on the internet
Your legend well be carved into the pages of history as the first person to complete the catalog!
My man !
That’s really freaking cool. I hope it plays out like that
I agree, and I’ve already seen this happen!
One popular instance, Beehaw announced that they defederated from lemmy.world and shitjustworks to protect itself from an onslaught of new folks. Beehaw’s admins say that lemmy.world and shitjustworks have let in a lot of folks who aren’t well vetted and are the focus of most moderation action, so they’re restricting access from those two instances.
And I’m over here on an instance with 600 users like, “Hm. That’s a pity. Glad I’m not as basic as those poor folks.”
One benefit that people don’t talk about enough is it naturally tends towards smaller community sizes than in a centralized system which is a better fit for our tribal human brains.
We’re not great with speaking into a room with 1,000 people in it, much less a million.
The problem is that it’s worse for keeping topics centralized and fragments communities for external reasons. It’s antithetical to the idea of a link aggregator where you centralize all of your news if you need to use several of them to make it work. Defederation should be a last resort to protect the admins from legal action, content manipulation, or brigading, not because beehaw thinks open signups harm their safe space. Making the internet a safe space is how we got to this point with Twitter/Google/meta/reddit, and everyone wants to do it all over again to rebuild their echo chambers.
Perhaps keeping topics de-centralized is a key part of keeping systems from turning tyrannical. That’s the theory behind the term “totalitarian”: that too much unification of thought produces behavioral restrictions, via the justification that if the truth of each topic is known and indisputable, then there’s no reason to share power in society as long as the person in power knows the One Truth.
Centralized systems designed to uncover one clear answer, such as stack overflow, have every reason to fight against redundancy in answers. Anything rightly called a community though should not be built around the (totalitarian) idea that conversations are best centralized and made non-redundant.
Big important questions need to be rehashed millions of times, not just covered once with millions of audience members.
99% of the content people post and interact with doesn’t have a reason for multiple copies of it’s conversation to exist. Most content is consumed not discusses.
Yet when a person arrives and asks a question they are discussing. If they wanted to consume, the could.
And the vast majority of the users consume the answers, not the discussion. They don’t ask the questions, hey look them up, and if no one asked, or no one answered, they can’t find anything and just give up. They don’t ask.
And some of them don’t even bother with trying to look it up. They just ask, because they like that method of getting information.
Most communities do not like when people come in asking the same basic questions over and over again. I don’t think you understand how link aggregators work.
Damn, this actually made me feel chills. This is actually a universe in the making. It’s new life.
I don’t get how this is insightful… The internet already has 4chan, okbuddyretard, whatever, people will always form communities