The problem is that signing up on one instance locks you to that instance. If the instance goes down, so does all of your data, history, settings, etc. Sure, you can create multiple accounts, but then it’s up to you to create secure, unique passwords for each and manage syncing between them. Nobody will do this for more than two instances.
Without this, people will be less willing to sign up for instances that they perceive “might not make it”, and flock for the biggest ones, thus removing the benefits of federation.
This is especially bad for moderators. Currently, external communities that exist locally on defederated instances cannot be moderated by the home-instance accounts. This isn’t a problem of moderation tooling, but it can be (mostly*) solved by having a single identity that can be used on any instance.
*Banning the account could create the same issue.
Communities need to federate too.
Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.
Obviously there are plenty of bugs and QoL features that could dramatically improve the usage of Lemmy, but these two things are critical to unification across decentralized services.
What do you think?
EDIT: There’s been a lot (much more than I expected) of good discussion here, so thank you all for providing your opinions.
It was pointed out that there are github issues #1 and #2 addressing these points already, so I wanted to put that in the main post.
It’s not an instance problem, it’s a Lemmy sorting/loading/ranking problem. It doesn’t seem to show very well popular posts from other instances like beehaw or lemmy.ml.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Regarding point 1- if people would just stop signing up on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org, because they have the most people-
Things would go much smoother!
Pick an instance based on uptime, or hell, create your own instance.
Piling all of the eggs into a single basket is destined to result in failure.
I signed up with lemmy.ca and I regret it. It doesn’t load “all” content very well so I have to hunt to find content. Hopefully they will fix it.
We can only go up from here!
Also, cannot promise my instance is any better, but, your welcome to try it. https://lemmyonline.com/
Its working quite nicely today though.
It’s not an instance problem, it’s a Lemmy sorting/loading/ranking problem. It doesn’t seem to show very well popular posts from other instances like beehaw or lemmy.ml.
Known issue, going to be fixed soon in the 18.0 release. Until then, just gotta sort by new.