We really really need to stop emphasizing growth of individual instances.
It entirely defeats the point of federation.
This is not the win that you think it is…
Right? I’m still trying to figure it all out but I don’t get what the benefit would be to having a username on a big instance. Seems like bragging rights would go to people who have their own instance.
But also the op didn’t say it was a win… they just stated the fact. So there’s that.
There are some real issues around federation that are kind-of working against the whole system right now. I have my own instance that I am trying to grow, but I would have to manually connect to every community to see whats happening in the broader fediverse. Its isolating and making it impossible to grow the community.
Federation in lemmy needs to be reconsidered. Instances shouldnt be trying to become monoliths like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, or beehub. Lemmys should be niche focused and then sharing that focus with the fediverse. But federation/ discovery need to be re-imagined for that to make sense.
As it stands, discovery makes it so that the style of growth which is preferred from a content discovery is a few very large lemmy instances instead of many many medium and small instances. The result is a more fragile, less diverse, less stable fediverse.
Is it stable?
You bet, it is online 99% of 50% of the time.
That’s more than my body is online
99.53% stable to be exact!
Yeah but a lot of those subscribers are probably bots.
That’s interesting. I picked up memebership in both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world (same username) after trying Beehaw and finding that I was met with an endless circle of progress when submitting…
Wait until it is twice as big. :)
Too much growth for a single instance can be a bad thing. Lemmy instances are typically run by a single administrator at their own expense. These are not necessarily big powerful servers with big bandwidth. I would guess most are being hosted by VPS providers.
So you may be better off on a smaller instance with a server under less load. For example lemmy.ml is pretty much on its knees right now. You may have performance issues using them as your login instance.
There’s also bandwidth performance to consider, in other words you may have latency issues using an overseas instance in lieu of one local to your region.
The advantage of a decentralized system is you have options. I actually have a couple good instances I can log into. If one goes down or has some kind of issue, I can jump onto another one.
