this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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The instance itself did not do a "big land grab," users on the instances made the communities. And, as you should know, the fact that there's a community on one instance doesn't mean that the same topic can't be on another, there are several of those kinds of duplicates.
I signed up for .world because I liked the policies, it didn't seem to be heavily communist or hosted in an authoritarian country, and it seemed to be robust. Nobody told me I should make my account there; I saw zero advertising. I'm not sure what you think the admins did to make other people settle there.
And the fact that some people are donating to it in no way means they're making anything like profit. The admins didn't make a plea for me to donate anywhere that I saw, other than having the link in the sidebar, like many/most instances.
You seem to be taking frustrations out on people who don't deserve it. If the stability problems become an issue, people will just make accounts elsewhere.
They opened the gates and let people come in without knowing if they were able to handle the influx of people. By presenting themselves as a place that could welcome everyone, they end up robbing the opportunity for other instances to share the load and to absorb part of the user base. This is what I mean about "land grab".
A more sensible approach would be to have a feedback loop where they open up a limited number of spots, fill them, see how their instance and the overall fediverse behaves and adjust based on that new information.
You leave out the fact that @ruud was already running mastodon.world before all this. So he does have experience running a big instance. He had a team of moderators from mastodon.world that helped from the start.
The influx of people was never a problem, if you choose the right hosting provider you are prepared for these things. And the hosting company we use provides all those tools to help us grow. We started with a small server at Hetzner.de and gradually upgraded when it was required. They have no limits on bandwidth so that is also something Ruud looked at.
Anyway, you have a lot of say about how you would do things but you had a 3 years head start...
It's not a technical problem, but a systemic one. Getting way too big relative to the rest of the fediverse paints a target on your back. There is a reason your instance is being DDOS'd while so many others aren't and one instance being DDOS'd shouldn't be have such an impact on the overall system.
My point is that the sensible thing to do would've been to limit growth of .world and let others catch up. This is what the lemmy devs did with their instance, this is what Hugo from masto.host did to his service (stopped accepting new customers when he got close to 50% of the users) and this is even what Eugen did with mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the beginning.
I agree with your point of view but there is nothing that can be done about it.
It does feel sad to see one giant instance have almost all users and all traffic for me too. I was hoping it would become a proper decentralized platform with hundreds of islands of different servers filled with people and communities.
But fine, we don't always get what we want. I'm disappointed but will keep using Lemmy anyway. It's not a big tech service at least which is wonderful, and most people are nice.
Yes, from my comments it seems that I am criticizing the people working on lemmy or trying to paint them in a bad light. I am not saying that what they are doing is wrong, just misguided.
And I totally agree, at least this is not (and will not be) owned by Big Tech.