I had a vaguely similar idea a while ago and someone pointed out that this could incentivize spamming posts to as many communities as possible, even communities that are only questionably relevant or not relevant at all, to farm upvotes.
I agree that my idea probably wouldn’t be great, for the reasons we both stated. While multicommunities are a good idea, I’m not sure they address the specific issue bothering me either, of crossposts spamming the All feed. OP’s idea might help with that a little - but honestly, I just think the ‘Hot’ algorithm needs some more fine tuning, and perhaps custom logic to avoid showing duplicates.
On a vaguely similar note, it might be cool if using the crosspost feature pooled upvotes from the various crossposts, and only let one of the crossposts show up in anyone’s All feed at a given time. It would make having multiple splintered communities for one topic less annoying, encourage cross-posting, and reduce spam when someone crossposts something to 5 communities and all 5 show up on your All page.
To really work I think it would have to pool comments together too - but then you run into issues with moderation. I’m not sure if there’s a good way to fix that issue.
If I haven’t noticed the problem, is it really a problem?
I can live in a world where I’m out of reach from maybe 20% of the potential audience, and maybe I wouldn’t mind it if I noticed that a workaround was required for that. But I do very much mind having to live in a world where I have to be checking with the admins what the hell is going on and why I am shut off from communication with the majority through no fault of my own.
…Yes, it’s still a problem 👀 I can’t believe that needs to be said - stability is nice but reliability is also very important. It’s not good to have entire instances be effectively shadowbanned because of software issues.
While it was through no fault of your own, I’d also like to point out it was through no fault of lemmy.world, since the issue was that your instance was failing to federate to lemmy.world, and not the other way around. Neither the problem nor the fix was ever on lemmy.world’s side.
Sorry, but we will have to agree to disagree on this one. Saying “we are the largest and easiest place to get started, but if you don’t believe us here are some other places you can take a look” is completely different from “our home is full now, but the cool thing about the fediverse is that you can enjoy it wherever you are”.
We’ll keep disagreeing here as well - because it’s not accurate to say lemmy.world is full, nor is it accurate to say lemmy.world is positioning itself as somehow superior to or easier to start with than other instances. Its signup page literally has no text at all other than naming the information fields. Every single page on lemmy.world also has a direct link to join-lemmy.org in the lower right, where lemmy.world isn’t even listed as a recommended instance - just a popular one, in a randomized order list. Even the “Get started” guide in the lemmy.world sidebar takes a completely neutral tone about this instance, explains federation, and links to a site that lists other instances. The success of lemmy.world has nothing to do with bias or unfair practices. I’d wager it’s 90% word-of-mouth.
Yes, of course, and this is what needs to change!
I disagree that just having large instances, in and of itself, is a problem.
the second part
Slowing growth is still a gigantic downside when growth is one of the most important needs for the platform.
For your scenario: You could argue that this is actually a good thing from your perspective. You realized there was a problem because lemmy.world is so big. If most instances were of equal size you likely wouldn’t have noticed there was a problem at all. I’m willing to bet there are other instances you have the same problem with and just haven’t noticed because of how much smaller they are - but lemmy.world’s size helps bring problems like this to light, so they can be fixed.
the third part
That would be spreading the power, rather than spreading the load, on a semantic note.
I don’t disagree with this section in principle - but I do still disagree that the solution is to close registrations. The admins have already stated they have plans to inform new users about other instances during the registration process, and soon. That’s a good faith effort and a good middle ground.
the last part
You having to create an account here isn’t because lemmy.world is too large - it’s because of software issues. You mentioned elsewhere that you made a post from your own instance about the problem (I assume in this community, otherwise why would you expect that to work?) - but if your problem was that content from your instance wasn’t showing up in lemmy.world, I’m not really sure why you expected that to work. It’s not disturbing that you had to create an account here, because you would have had to do so even in the hypothetical scenario where there are, say, 20 main instances with about 4.5% of the active userbase each.
Closing registrations will reduce the size because users are dynamic: New users join and old users leave with any system. Close registration and you’re left with only old users leaving.
I also disagree with the implicit argument that lemmy.world is “large enough”. It’s large compared to most other instances - but in terms of long-term stability I think the lemmyverse needs at least 10x the active user count it currently has and ideally much more than that. They don’t all have to join lemmy.world, but closing the registration page for the most popular onboarding point for the lemmyverse is going to slow growth no matter how you implement it.
Closing registrations to “spread the load” also comes with the assumption that server load from active users is a problem. By all accounts it is not a problem, at all, for lemmy.world. If a time comes where there are so many users that it is, maybe they’ll consider something like this.
Just spitballing an idea I haven’t fully thought out: One interesting way to avoid excessive centralization may be to display a “Join lemmy” button to logged-out users, more prominent than the “Register” button, which redirects to join-lemmy.org/instances instead of the instance registration page. Though I agree with your point about join-lemmy in its current form being somewhat underwhelming as an onboarder. In addition to what you mentioned it could do with some filters (For language, at a minimum) and sorting (For instance age, size). Even adding a button that basically says “I understand the instance I pick isn’t that important, just send me to a random reliable one please” would help a lot.
In the long term I also hope Lemmy evolves to actually make the instance you’re on matter less - for example, by changing defaults on the homepage and search page to “All” instead of “Local”, showing global subscriber count instead of instance subscriber count when searching communities, adding ways to migrate accounts and communities between instances, and perhaps even adding a way to merge one instance into another if one admin no longer wants to maintain their instance, and another admin is willing to absorb them.
I don’t disagree with what you said, but I am more risk-averse than you are about it. I think it would be best in the long term to list servers with a proven dedication to the long-term existence and health of the community. This doesn’t necessarily mean the top 5, or even the top X, but it does mean excluding a server hosted on a laptop in someone’s closet with 8 users, or instances from completely unknown in the community admins that have existed for a month.
I can agree to that, but I can not and will not agree to the implication that the solution is simply to have no large instances. Federation has a lot of strengths, but it has a lot of weaknesses as well - there are drawbacks to large instances, but there are lots of benefits too, to both the instance and Lemmy as a whole, and closing new registrations invalidates that.
I think it’s more a case of long-term reliability than day-to-day reliability. Anyone can create a lemmy instance - including people who may lack the resources or long-term motivation to keep their instance on the internet for basically forever. That’s definitely going to be a much smaller risk with the more established instances - though I’m sure we’ll eventually have a lot of drama over some instance or another in the top 10 shutting down.
They don’t need to be in the same instance
No one, not even the lemmy.world admins, are suggesting that. In this very thread they’ve mentioned imminent plans to educate new users about other instances during the sign-up process.
Then we take that as an opportunity to educate them instead of tricking them out into believing that it is a good idea to put them all in the same server.
Nobody is being tricked here, and you need a seriously warped view of the situation to think otherwise.
They will also go back to reddit if they join a server that is constantly having outages.
You’re still making the same incorrect assumption that your original post made, that the stability issues are even tangentially related to user count instead of ongoing attacks. But again - new users figure out federation within a few days. If the outages bother them they’re smart enough to know they can try a different instance and now likely have the experience needed to know which one may be the best fit for them.
I’m too old for internet drama
100% of this drama was self-inflicted. You could have PMed an admin describing your problem and asking if they knew what was up. They seem like pretty helpful and reasonable people to me.
AKA, “we are too big to fail”?
Doesn’t really follow from any of what anyone has said - we’re not talking about lemmy.world failing, we’re talking about it closing registration. The one thing Lemmy needs to survive long-term is more active users. Putting up barriers to that, especially on the most popular instance, will hurt growth for the entire lemmyverse - because if there’s one thing new users implicitly don’t understand, it’s how federation works. A decent portion of people who try to sign up and fail will just give up and go back to reddit, and we’re all worse-off for it.
Not to mention that most people who do successfully join figure out how federation works pretty fast, and are more than capable of moving to another instance if they consider any of what you’ve mentioned important to them at all.
The reason you’re being downvoted is because you experienced a problem (Posts from your instance won’t show up in this instance), came up with a pet theory for why that problem might be happening (This instance must be dropping posts from small instances because it’s overloaded from all the users), assumed it was correct (Based on what, exactly? Because it’s definitely not correct), then came here to post about it in a very confrontational, demanding, and accusatory tone, with a seeming lack of desire or ability to consider that you may be the mistaken one. Moreso, the change you’re suggesting would have dramatic and perhaps negative repercussions for both this instance and Lemmy as a whole.
Replying to my own thread: This is becoming even more annoying now that pornlemmy.com is gaining popularity too.
I’m lemmy.world too, and I’ve got porn in my All feed a few times a day even with how many I’ve blocked - and all of my blocked ones have come directly from All. So who knows? Maybe you’re only browsing Local?
What mistakes are you referring to?
As far as my understanding goes, you can still see all content from lemmynsfw that predates the defederation, but you won’t see any new content posted to it.
It is a bizarre accusation because anyone who’s ever interacted with ChatGPT could plainly see neither this post nor my comments were generated by it.
Hiding NSFW content all together is also overkill - I still want to see non-pornographic NSFW content. This is a very commonly requested feature.
And the Indian Girls community showed up in the status bar because it was the first blocked community containing “lemmynsfw” from my Ctrl+F search, smartass.
Your instance isn’t even federated with lemmynsfw, nice try 😛
Is this actually true? Rowling herself aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an openly transphobic Harry Potter fan - granted I also don’t spend a huge amount of time in Harry Potter forums and stuff.