Excited by the “fediverse” but wondering about the future
In particular, it seems to me that centralization is almost a law of the universe (or at least a tendency). Lemmy may start decentralized, with dozens or hundreds of meaningfully-sized instances, but it’s easy to imagine a not-far future where most everyone has settled on just a handful of instances (or even just one).
I don’t mean to just be a pessimist here. I’m sure I’m far from the first person to wonder about this, and I’m curious whether there are ideas of how to counterbalance the tendency toward centralization.
I think centralization is popular cuz it’s simple. It’s a lot easier to figure out one login for Reddit or IG than all the different instances
Well technically you don't have to have logins for all the instances - that's the beauty of it
while that is true, finding and joining new /c's is klunky atm and not set up in a way that makes large growth likely
Definitely. As much as a centralized /c namespace is against all the principles of a decentralized system, lack of a centralized namespace results in topical duplication and hinders discovery. I don't know how, but seems to me some sort of happy medium has to fall out.