I’ve seen around 3 occasions of that this week, altho I have never seen anything like it before.
if I remember correctly they were:
- smack talking a mod (FlyingSquid) for saying not to report the same comment twice, when they were different comments, and the report was spam
- someone comparing .world with .ml in politics (as in there was a comment saying "this post will be overrun with .ml people, and then a comment going “but you are from .world”) (Maybe Im part of the problem? I have been called out for being a fascist because I questioned the “puching nazis” theme)
- one more which I can’t remember.
Anyways, what is all that about? Are people really starting to hate on 50% of the lemmy population because of their instance?
I don’t think the existence of large instances is in itself strictly antithetical to decentralization. The network effect makes them inevitable.
The power in the fediverse is everyone has a standard toolset to interact with the entire fediverse. Most people won’t, and that’s okay. The important thing is that, should larger communities become too oppresive as they gentrify, replacing them is a cheap decision, as you and everyone like-minded with you can squad up and leave at any time and lose nothing as the standard tooling of the platform facilitates that migration. You have mobility in the fediverse, and that permits choice to those who seek it.
This will stop being true once the larger instances start augmenting their experiences with proprietary nonsense. Features that only work there, that you can invest into and become dependant on, that you’d have to give up if you leave.
The day that happens will be the day that chunk of the Fediverse dies. Or, well, it won’t die, it will probably flourish and do very well. But it won’t be the Fediverse anymore. It will just be another knee-high-fence-gated community, that happens to run on Fediverse tech.