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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

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LeoPanthera·

Well, this kills the idea of Lemmy before it even got the chance to be born.

Beehaw is the second largest instance by number of users - and LemmyWorld is the third.

Them defederating from each other effectively shards the network into two halves, making the whole thing useless.

Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.

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> making the whole thing useless

Why's that? The typical user problem isn't "see all the content", it's "see some good content". As long as the two halves have critical mass, it could well be fine. For example, the fact that Reddit and Twitter were separate networks didn't prevent both of them from growing pretty well.

In the past several years I've noticed a viewpoint gaining popularity, which is that if you can't be the biggest fish in the pond it's not worth bothering with, which is a quite odd to me. You even see it in online games where the majority of players all pile into a single server, then complain about the problems they've brought upon themselves by doing that (lag, instability, etc) instead of inhabiting a few moderate population servers.

It feels closely related to the reluctance to use two different chat applications to talk to two different people. It's not really a big deal, but you still get so much resistance from people. As if their phone is only capable of running a single application. The network effect related control of user groups as a result of this strange pointless idea is so corrosive.

Run your own Lemmy and federate to both.

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