let’s address the possibility that like mastodon/matrix 99% of ppl will flock to the biggest handful of servers
What is the real value of decentralization given that? Outside of like political unrest.
And what role do small servers really do in that landscape? Obv “novelty” servers like midov cater to the like lolicon enthusiasts and I’m sure there are a few other servers dedicated to illegal things. Regional severs are quite compatible with various nationalists/patriots
IMO it’s less of an issue with Lemmy, at least from my personal perspective (assuming that implementations and infra can scale).
On Mastodon I am on a large instance for a single reason: to get a good feed for my hashtag follows. On Lemmy if I am understanding of the federation model right I should be able to see all posts from a given community as long as I subscribe to it regardless of what instance I am on. It should be easier to switch to different instances too since we don’t have to worry about individual followers.
One bad scenario I can imagine is that the centralized instance hosting the majority of users and popular communities refuses to federate with anyone. I am kinda hoping that the community wouldn’t go along with that.