Betteridge’s law of headlines

Yeah, it’s not immediately obvious what the implications of an account on a particular instance are. I think over time it should become more obvious, for example meta data about instances on lemmy instance directory sites, so users know what they’re signing up for. I also think things will settle down as communities find an instance that works for them, and tools improve for more granular control over federation.

I think it’ll take a little while to settle down, but I’d expect the communities to congregate on more permissive, well federated servers. In the short term I’m doing similar to you what you proposed, e.g. having accounts on various servers, but I expect the need for this to go away as things settle down. I already focus on a couple of instances more than others.

I do think that less permissive instances will still thrive though, although maybe not so much for general content. That may change as more granular controls and better tools emerge so it’s less of an ‘all or nothing’ approach to federating.

I can see your point and do agree that it’s disruptive now. It also exacerbates the difficulty of learning a new platform. Despite that though I think the early adopters are best equipped to cope with that. They’re already dealing with rough tooling and little documentation, official or social.

In terms of it happening when Lemmy, or even the fediverse as a whole, is bigger, if there aren’t tools and practices in place to manage it I think the impact would be significantly more detrimental. Without it happening in ‘the early days’ those tools and practices are a lot less likely to be developed.

We need content and a welcoming community for everyone to stay.

I think that idea is exactly what both Beehaw and lemmy.world are trying to do. I don’t know all the thinking of the instance admins, but from my observations I see Beehaw prioritising their community and lemmy.world prioritising federation and availability. I don’t see it as ‘infighting and politicking’, just co-existing view points for managing instances. To put it in terms of popular monolithic platforms, I’d imagine there would be a bit of a shakedown if 4chan, reddit, slashdot, digg, et al. started federating. I’ll not attempt to draw parallels between lemmy instances and other platforms, that’s above my pay grade :)

I imagine we’ll end up with a spectrum of instances with varying degrees of federation and permisiveness, and that the directory services that are popping up will continue to improve to help you find and instance that works for you.

I think one of the challenges with migration is that reddit doesn’t map one-to-one with Lemmy. With a monolithic platform, centralised admin can enforce the types of things I think your hoping for. On Lemmy I think inter-instance differences are inevitable, while on reddit the concepts didn’t exist for it to become possible. Working through how those are handled will result in Lemmy as a whole improving.

I’m pretty optimistic about it.

I think this is going to produce some interesting results, which will likely help progress Lemmy as a whole.

One of the regular topics coming up is users not knowing which instance they should create a user on, and what the implications of being a user on a particular instance are. This change by the Beehaw is going to clarify some of the implications and help drive people towards one instance or another, or even to have multiple accounts on different instances.

I think this will increase the adoption of Beehaw for users that the Beehaw admins are looking for in their community, which benefits the Beehaw instance. Conversely, I think the more general communities on Beehaw that aren’t there specifically for the community Beehaw is trying to foster will likely migrate to the equivalent communities on other instances and settle there. While Beehaw was popular and federated it made sense to subscribe to technology@beehaw.org, but now it’s defederated I’d expect an equivalent community on a more permissive and widely federated instance to gain traction.

Right now it feels pretty disruptive. Arguably this occurring now with a relatively small number of users (thousands rather than millions) affected is preferable and will help shake out these issues, which will make it smoother for future users.

It will help Lemmy become more resilient. The tooling to help manage an instance defederating is also likely to be useful for instances going offline, or otherwise disconnecting from the fediverse. Better that that tooling is in place early.

And as if to illustrate my point, Beehaw is no longer federated with Lemmy.world, so @mountainmycelium@beehaw.org won’t be getting updates to this thread any more.

As a web fronted, or mobile app?

I’m using jerboa (android app) and would find an equivalent of reddit’s ‘multi’ system useful. I’d likely switch to an app that provided that. I wonder if it could be implemented solely within an app, or if it would need backend support from lemmy.

My instance is @lemmy.world, so this community/post is “local” to my instance, but in practice that’s not super important.

I think that’s generally true, however it’s worth noting that what you can see from other (non-local) instances is dependent on the admin of your instance. They choose with other instances to federate (exchange data, e.g. communities, posts, comments, etc) with. If they choose not to federate with a specific instance, you won’t see content from that instance.

There are already examples of this, but I don’t know the details well enough to be confident in expanding on it.