For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807
Happy to see that nearly all the biggest Lemmy instances are blocking it, with the glaring exception of lemmy.world, which is the largest by far. lemmy.world is to lemmy as AOL was to the early internet—the default bucket for those who don’t know any better.
Well, for non-German speaking europeans it makes sense, last time I checked .world was the only decently-sized English-speaking server in my area.
EDIT: well, apparently that’s no longer the case, good to be wrong I guess
Lots of instances are hosted in Europe, maybe even the majority. I know lemm.ee and lemmy.ml are
Lemm.ee still shows up as “private” in the Observer, but I don’t know how I missed .ml being in France (I really doubt they somehow “ moved” the server). Checking again you’re right though, the situation got a lot better over time.
Why does this matter? You can see everything on lemmy.world even if you come from a small instance. Size is not necessarily a benefit here.
A small instance has a higher probability of the owner stopping maintaining it. Obviously this doesn’t apply if the instance is yours, but I’m not tech-savvy enough to do that.
You actually raise a good point: People may not join a smaller instance if you’re not confident it’s going to hang around.
I might see if I can publish a contingency/continuity plan in our next community update.
True, that’s fair. But I’d still join a small server to give it a chance and to keep them afloat. Small servers would maybe stay around more if more people joined :)