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.
As long as there’s not much barrier to interacting with users and content hosted on other instances I think it should be fine. Was there any tendency towards centralization of subreddits? I think that’s the closer analogy. Different communities on different instances will become popular among the all-instance community, and those will continue as major hubs.
one may argue that part of the ‘enshitification’ was a tendency for subreddits with high traffic to end up in the control of one of a handful of 'power’mods, leading to a de-facto hegemony, and by extension homogenization of content (think default subs)
That seems like a different dynamic to me. Subreddits have a divergent tendency because people have different interests, tastes, etc.
But new communities can all be created all on the same big Lemmy instance, each on its own instance, or anything in between.
To take the extreme example of one community per instance—I don’t think we’ll see that because spinning up and maintaining a new instance would be an incredibly high cost (time, if not money) just for someone to start a new community.
Even in an in-between state where there are dozens or hundreds of non-trivial instances, someone deciding to start a community would be incentivized to do so in the most popular instance (or one of the most popular ones) because the community would be visible to more people more quickly (since non-local instances have to discover it first).
But to your point, this depends on how much of an advantage it is for a new community to be instance-local. In my (very limited) experience with Lemmy so far, there’s a definite difference in ease of finding/subscribing locally vs on another instance.
Maybe this can be addressed in time. And that’s kind of the reason for my post—I think it’s worth thinking about what dynamics might bias things toward or against centralization, and trying to keep the balance tilted toward decentralization.
Yeah definitely the key to decentralization is having the minimum amount of action on the instance level. Everything should be either directed within a community, or to lemmy generally. Might be a good idea to even get rid of the “local” view level - or at the very least not make that the default.