The first is just human nature. That’s not a problem with decentralization, but with humans. And it’s always a tipping point, it’s impossible to make decisions that are 100% agreed on with enough people. But just like Reddit is learning now, once you’ve pushed it above a certain level, you’re going to be bleeding users to either smaller or larger communities. Zipf’s law says nothing about how those transitions happen, just that it “gravitates” towards settling in the distribution it over time. You don’t know how long it will takes before the hierarchies settles again.
The second isn’t really an issue with Lemmy. Since the protocol is fully transparent, you have sites like https://the-federation.info/ which provide full transparency on the statistics. There’s also no way for instances to “speak on behalf” of another instance, so if one instance tampers with things, it will be plain and clearly visible on other instances. There are also other ways for people to talk to each other besides through Lemmy itself. If a conspiracy like you’re saying would take place, the news would eventually reach the users of the instance being affected, and another Reddit will occur.
For once the power is much close to the hands of the users, and not some CEO who isn’t beholden to anyone.
I disagree it’s something we don’t talk about enough though, since we’re talking about it right now, and it’s been a very frequent discussion point regarding pretty much every big site. Not to mention it’s the talk of the day for the last month or so because of the Reddit API changes. Hell, if the discussion hadn’t been had in the past, we would’ve had another centralized Reddit-like clone right now, and not the fediverse.
The first is just human nature. That’s not a problem with decentralization, but with humans. And it’s always a tipping point, it’s impossible to make decisions that are 100% agreed on with enough people. But just like Reddit is learning now, once you’ve pushed it above a certain level, you’re going to be bleeding users to either smaller or larger communities. Zipf’s law says nothing about how those transitions happen, just that it “gravitates” towards settling in the distribution it over time. You don’t know how long it will takes before the hierarchies settles again.
The second isn’t really an issue with Lemmy. Since the protocol is fully transparent, you have sites like https://the-federation.info/ which provide full transparency on the statistics. There’s also no way for instances to “speak on behalf” of another instance, so if one instance tampers with things, it will be plain and clearly visible on other instances. There are also other ways for people to talk to each other besides through Lemmy itself. If a conspiracy like you’re saying would take place, the news would eventually reach the users of the instance being affected, and another Reddit will occur.
For once the power is much close to the hands of the users, and not some CEO who isn’t beholden to anyone.
I disagree it’s something we don’t talk about enough though, since we’re talking about it right now, and it’s been a very frequent discussion point regarding pretty much every big site. Not to mention it’s the talk of the day for the last month or so because of the Reddit API changes. Hell, if the discussion hadn’t been had in the past, we would’ve had another centralized Reddit-like clone right now, and not the fediverse.