Lemmy is federated, but still, the instances with the most activity dominate people's feeds

crwcomposer@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 13 points –

Instances with funding sources will have the best hardware capable of supporting the largest communities, and will have the most activity, but then aren't people's feeds still influenced by capital, like with reddit, in the end?

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There's a suggestion (and probably an open issue on Github as well) that the Hot and Active post rankings should take into account the size of a community that a post comes from. A post from a community with 20 subscribers and 50 upvotes is proportionally more "hot" than a post from a community with 5000 subscribers and 200 upvotes.

But with Reddit there is no alternative. Use your capital to push people in too far of a direction and they’ll leave to other instances.

Unless all of the other instances defederate it, people will still see the content in their feeds.

If the content is low quality, other servers may choose to de-federate with them. And there is nothing forcing individual members to subscribe to the communities of those corporate instances.

Lemmy's average user, today, is keenly aware of that. But if Lemmy gets popular, then the average user will be much less aware.

Then changes will be made to make it more accessible. Platforms grow to accommodate their users, or fail.

See: Digg, MySpace, Google+, Vine, Friendster, currently Reddit

I want to start a community, but feels like there is no point because I joined a fairly small instance dedicated to the UK, whereas the topic is not UK-related (Linux audio). So it feels like my community will get ignored and won't show in people's feeds.

Why not make the community on an instance better suited for it? You can still mod it from your main account on the uk instance.

I'm still getting familiar with the way lemmy works. So would I have to create a user on that instance, create the community and then make my main user a mod on the community? My understanding is that you cannot make a community on a different instance.

is there a place for niche instances to post thier wares?

I am curating an AI/ML specific instance for anyone wanting to build in that space.

I’m interested in that and would join

Come on over, and introduce yourself https://lemmy.intai.tech/post/2710

Registrations are open for new accounts if you want to home there.

Joined :-) ... but still waiting for posts to populate over on our instance (lemmy.pro) so can interact. Will do soon!

subbed to your cybersecurity community, that should help speed things up. seems to take 4-24 hours for instances to really start syncing quickish. if my logs are any indication we are over the hump and things should speed up soon.