Otherwise, if we have a lot of medium sized instances but the most popular communities are hosted on just a few huge instances, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of distributing load across many instances?
If that’s the case, how do we solve the cumbersome user experience of having to subscribe to the same community over and over again across a ton of medium instances?
Admins simply need to take responsibility. If a community already exists in the Lemmyverse, I don’t allow it to be created on my instance.
That’s the thing, if instance admins do that to avoid duplicate communities, won’t that just mean that a few huge instances will be the ones with most of the popular communities, and have outsized sway/traffic costs?
Then we’re back to square one and defeat the whole purpose of distributing load across many medium instances. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
You’re not putting traffic on the server that hosts a community when you browse it from another instance. Also, I believe when you post and upload an image it’s hosted on the server you’re browsing on, not the federated one that has the community.
It gets copied to the existing community as well (and every instance it’s federated with).
So the real consideration is that large communities are heavy on storage for any instance with a user that uses it. Ideally there are lots of small communities and instances so nothing gets too much traffic.
Interesting, thanks for the clarification.
I suppose the “best” way would be to distribute the big communities over different instances, like one instance gets “pics”, another gets “memes”, someone else gets “news”, etc. But of course that will never happen.
This is what has already happened to some extend, but communities are free to move away to another instance. Fx !Android[email protected] moved to !Android[email protected].
You could also say that the moderators of communities that exist on multiple instances, have a certain responsibility as well, but it is tricky. Beehaw.org has many of the same communities that the rest of the Lemmyverse has, but they also defederate with the biggest instance lemmy.world.
I’m taking a more free-spirited approach to my instance, communities can be formed as the users please here. The ideal would be lots of medium-sized instances each with a few large communities, but ultimately people will join where they want and we don’t have much control over it.
Unfortunately, that’s the wrong thinking. There are different kinds of mods for controversial topics. Let’s say: UFOs. Mods on one lemmy instance might allow only sightings (that’s the deal with the reddit one, for example), but another one might allow also for abductions (as it should, since it’s part and parcel with the whole thing for many people). So disallowing communities from existing on different servers, it controls the narrative and creates pigeonhole opinions. It needs to be something for everyone instead.
Just because you disagree with my opinion, doesn’t make it “the wrong thinking” 😊
I see what you mean, but there will always be someone who disagrees with the mods of a community. Instead of creating yet another c/ufo community, it would make more sense to create c/ufo_abductions fx. Your example is a good case for actually creating another c/ufo, but controversy is not going to be the issue every time someone wants to create an already existing community.
And I’m not saying there can’t be any duplicate communities at all. I just think admins should give it some thought, before creating the 8th c/technology community.
As @[email protected] also said, it would be something I would also take into consideration as well, if someone asked to have a community created on my instance.
Yea … that’s why I ask a new community that seems like a duplicate what they’re going to do differently. I think being open and explicit about differences, even if slight, is pretty important.
Eh, I don’t think that’s all that helpful. Mods change hands, and original goals change as well. Yeah, transparency is good, but redundancy is better.