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.
Well, I guess email is one counterexample. Though we can all see its issues (spam, overzealous spam filters, complete lack of “feature development”, even though that’s probably a good thing there).
Also, another issue I’m worried about is horizontal scalability. I hope that as communities grow it won’t become cost-prohibitive to run a new instance (as it will have to mirror too much content).
Email isn’t really decentralised since a while anymore:
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
It’s Decentralised in the protocol, but the spirit of it’s execution isn’t…
I’m certainly aware of these issues, and wrestle with them regularly, as I still host email myself. That said, my professional stuff is also going through Outlook (my worst enemy as a self hoster, but I can’t really switch right now).
Still, I see it as a positive that with enough resources/time, you can still get into this space, evidenced by all the smaller email providers which still pop up and seem to have pretty good deliverability. It’s just still the best we’ve got. We won’t widely agree on anything better anytime soon, even in more technical circles.
While it’s not easy to host email, it’s still possible. There’s still good email providers out there as well. So while it’s not perfect, it’s still better than if it was fully centralized.
I expect roughly the same from Lemmy.