That is why it's important to also use other software than Lemmy like Mbin or Piefed. Users want choice and the Fediverse is only as decentralized as the software running on it. So please, think about this.
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Incredible to think about that we got it right the first time (with email) and still had to spend the last 20 years complaining about centralized social networks.
I dont think its the software* but the instance that matters. Everyone being on lw is not good (not that there is anything wrong with lw, just that centralization is bad). Thankfully most lemmy apps nowadays default to lemm.ee which should hopefully counter most of the centralization. Lemmy apps should rotate the default server when it gets too big which will help a lot (also shows the impact defaults have).
*Software would have mattered if the main devs instance was also the biggest. Or a very popular lemmy client defaulted to their own instance. With lemmy thats not the case.
Great point. If defaults didn’t matter Google wouldn’t have spent billions of dollars buying the default search position on other browsers.
I do not agree with you. Yes I'm a developer myself of Mbin. And I created Mbin. However, the problem with decentralization is that you still need to trust the developers who are building the decentralized apps. So within a decentralized ecosystem the centralized point are the developers and its project.
If you do not agree with Lemmy, you can go to Mbin. And visa versa; if you do not agree with Mbin devs, you can go to Lemmy, etc. Meaning you do need to have alternatives, otherwise choice is an illusion and decentralization is also an illusion.
~ Melroy, Mbin developer.
Big fan of mbin,
I'm sure this has been asked before, but do you plan on adding support for lemmy's api? Lemmy really has the edge in apps.
I think a surefire way to help with this would be to have a rule that any instance that becomes the largest one on Lemmy should lock itself instantly. That way, we'll only surpass the current max number of users on a single instance until it's completely spread out
This sounds neat, I kinda like this
I would suggest giving it a smallish margin so that it wouldn't get annoying with two similarly sized instances.
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Also, have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active and count the number of non-LW communities in the top 20
Ironically, !fediverse@lemmy.zip could also be an alternative to this community.
@coffeeadmin@lemmy.coffee , have you considered crossposting there?
I think piefeds combined view makes this less of an issue. Like people subscribe to/post in the big communities because they are more active so get more comments and stuff. But in piefed you get the combined discussion from all the communities so you get the same experience even if you are subscribed to a less popular community on that topic.
Feeds are awesome 😎
Ex: https://piefed.social/f/fediversevideos
Allows you to sub to many fediverse account/communities/etc...
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I really do want to point out, Gmail is gonna get a massive lead as time goes on.
Doing parental consent forms for my schools library, most of the parents email were yahoo, Hotmail, etc. but EVERY SINGLE student email was Gmail, with the exception of like 10 out of (at least) 300 pages
(edit: to clarify, 300 pages is 300 emails)
There really is no competitor to Google Drive’s online collaborative document and slideshow editing right now. Apple and Microsoft have made some weak attempts but until their software works fully in a browser and is 100% free to get started, it won’t catch on. It not just about email.
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Been on Gmail since it was invite only. It really is best in class. Hate on Google all ya like, but they got a lock on email early in the game.
And for those that think getting away from it is a matter of choosing another email provider, I'll say that Gmail does loads more than deliver email. Authentication is a huge and obvious use. Reading comments around here leads me to believe that many don't understand Google for Business and how integrated an org can be with those services.
Another note, just because the domain isn't gmail.com doesn't mean it isn't served by Google. For most companies it would be insane to host their own services and cheaper to let Google handle it all.
The raw SMTP landscape on the internet is such a shitshow. Setting up a SMTP server requires so many goddamn condoms that you might as well just give up and start using some other professional email service. Or you set it up just to forward email to a GMail account, and even then, Gmail bitches about how much spam you're forwarding it and blocks you for a time.
That's because these students were brain washed on that garbage.
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This is a terrible distribution and the semi-centralisation and gatekeeping by the established actors is one of the reason email is dying.
I think we can do much better than that 👍
Email has been "dying" for 20+ years. I'll believe it when I see it.
yeah its hard for an essential service to die. I will spout one of my super downvoted opinions but I think every government should be providing email service the same way they provide physical mail service. With all the rights currently given to physical mail. Im not saying as the only option and im being idealistic in thinking we can do like what we did with physical mail in this modern time. But I don't care. Its essential and there should be a version people have that is a right and cannot go away.
I'm not sure why the USPS shouldn't be the sole provider of email in the US.
Why in the world should it be?
No profit motive and no private interests.
I'm sure there could still be private carriers, just like there's still private delivery services like UPS and FedEx, but I don't see why the average person should be relying on a private company for essential infrastructure.
You really trust the US government to control your communications? Especially given the last 20 years?
There exist plenty of free email platforms right now. I'm not against the government providing one, but unlike physical packages, sending an email to Bumfuck, Missouri doesn't cost any more than sending it across town.
There's the cost of the ISP, and for that I think there should be a municipal option for sure, to provide service to unprofitable regions just like postal mail and rural electrification.
There's a reason they're trying to destroy and privatize USPS. It's highly unionized and the workers won't let them use USPS against us.
Also, while we're at it, USPS should also provide municipal internet.
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You really trust the US government to control your communications? Especially given the last 20 years?
No, I don't trust right-wing Nazis to control my communications. And I sure as fuck trust the government more than I trust greedy corporations. The problem is that the corporations have been fucking up the capitalistic/democratic balance for the last 50 years.
I think every government should be providing email service the same way they provide physical mail service. With all the rights currently given to physical mail.
We've tried that in Germany. The De-Mail was already dead when it was born.
I mean it should not be. It should be run if no one is using it but government communication should always be through it so you know its legit. I'd be fine if it was not popular. I mean if everyone sent everything through ups and fedex I would still want usps to be a thing here.
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I think every government should be providing email service the same way they provide physical mail service
The problem with that is that email is not really secure enough for sensitive stuff like your bank account statements or your health/medicine journals from your doctor.
That is why in Denmark we don't have the government provide actual email, but there is rather a digital mailing system where you authenticate with your digital ID and can receive secured mail from banks, municipalities, health authorities, tax authorities and others.
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We should have large semi-centralized services. But they should be democratically controlled.
Do you ever think about why cities form? Rural life has a lot of appealing characteristics, plus it's the starting state of the world. Cities form because there is an advantage to size, proximity and specialization. If we had a new planet and completely evenly distributed the population across its land, we'd very quickly form cities regardless.
It's the same with centralized services. It takes a lot of special knowledge and equipment to run an email service. The average Lemmy user may have those resources, but even here, how many of us run our own email servers?
It costs less per person in resources to add more users after the first one. So there's an incentive to aggregate users together. And once you have a certain number of users, maybe you figure out some way to fund your operation, and you can pay more people to add features/capabilities. Soon your entity not only has more users, it's more appealing than a plan vanilla email service, and you get even more users. You're doing it cheaper and better than the DIYers.
I think centralization and size are naturally occurring. We should think about ways to exist and benefit from them, so something like Gmail but run as a worker cooperative.
As someone who runs a Lemmy server I can tell you that it isn't as simple as that.
Yes, there is an initial benefit from having more users on an instance, but this initial scaling benefit isn't linear. It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further. Only after going over that hump it might become cheaper again at the scale of hundred-thousand of users or so, but Lemmy the software is currently also unlikely to scale as a single instance to such numbers, so it isn't just a system operator question.
So no, unless you want to fully commercialize the Fediverse and bring in external investors to fund the getting over that initial hump, semi-centralisation is not a feasible way forward. And what would even be the point of that? Reddit exists and is basically the same.
Luckily ActivityPub is designed to scale horizontially through lots of smaller (but not tiny) instances, so I think we can manage without the above.
My argument isn't about the fediverse specifically. It's that centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and the lack of friction resulting from centralization can make it more competitive.
What is the reason the cost per user of hosting a Lemmy server goes up after a few thousand users? If it were say, you need more expensive hardware, that doesn't necessarily disprove my argument. Just because a bigger investment is needed doesn't mean it's not cheaper per user or not more competitive. Just that you or I don't have the capital, or that we might see centralization bad because we have bad experiences with centralized entities.
Also just because something is more competitive doesn't mean it's morally or aesthetically more desirable. The specialized army fed and trained by an empire overruns the brave and happy tribe of hunter gatherers.
What I'm saying is since we know the phenomenon of centralization occurs, we should try to subvert it as much as possible by introducing democratic structures.
Lets agree to disagree on the "natural" centralisation aspect, which is IMHO nonsense. And very recently the US empire was beaten by some tribes in Afghanistan, so I think your argument needs some further thinking 😏
The reason it gets so much more expensive after a few thousand users is complexity. Up to that point a single server can be used and the necessary sysadmin skills are not very high. Basically anyone with a few weeks of training can rent a server and run such an instance.
After a few thousand users it gets steeply more complex, when you need to think about running a database cluster and load-balance the frontends etc. Not very many people have the necessary skillset for that, and even less are volunteering to do this. So you end up being forced to hire someone expensive with a high in demand skill. Basically your operation suddenly jumps from an easy to fund with donations volunteer effort, to a must commercialize or otherwise fund venture that is highly unsustainable in the short term.
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It'll probably follow Zipf's law, like most things.
Okay, based on that article Zipf's law seems to mostly apply to languages. Cities, for example, don't follow it.
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The thing about email is that the software is proprietary. Each of these providers has their own implementation of the interface, features, and integration with their tools (Google drive, photos, etc).
As long as lemmy servers run lemmy software, this won't happen, or at least won't be an issue as you can move to another server and not have to change your usage habits.
However if some server owners decide to fork Lemmy and develop their proprietary server, overhaul the UI, add features and attract users, it will start to become a problem.
Email had standardized protocols and clients for 50 years, and still does.
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email is a standard protocol. You can run your own server using FOSS software in 5 minutes if you start now. One of the biggest problems is that you will have a hard time "federating" to gmail and others due to the spam problematic, but that is something that we will see with Lemmy, too. Currently I can spin up my own server and start pushing shit to lemmy.world and other bigger instances, but I feel that this will change with the coming spam waves
Lemmy's AGPL license doesnt allow forking the code into a proprietary server. All changes need to be open source as well, otherwise the operator can get sued. So a proprietary Lemmy software would have to be developed from scratch which would take a long time.
Lemmy uses activityPub, and open protocol for social networking.
Piefed and mbin are both open source, and interoperate with lemmy.
Lemmy.world, lemm.ee.
federation and the concept of communities have always been a little awkward together since it's based on sunreddits where there is only one always.
The only ways this pans out is with having one server where the community is most successful to eat up the others or having like two or three who hate each other
It really just depends on how users have to choose a service and how much it matters. With email the service used doesn't really matter so most either use what is given to them (here that's often from their ISP) or what is recomended to them (e.g. Gmail or Hotmail here in the EU)
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