EDIT: Thank you all for your answers, now I’m reassured this platform is in good hands and we will always have the freedom to switch. Let’s make this place vibrant, diverse and decentralized, like the old web used to be.
I feel like this instance is getting too big and all the content is being centralized here. Am I right or there are other instances thriving too?
Wherever I go I keep seeing lots of lemmy.world users and communities and kind of feel worried about centralization.
I think this highlights a very good point. It’s totally ok for everything to gravitate to a central instance as long as that instance is run in a way that everyone is happy with. The key is the the moment something changes and users aren’t happy, the decentralised nature of Lemmy gives those users an exit strategy - a way to replace the bad instance and carry on.
If a single Lemmy instance becomes the new Reddit and then pulls a move that angers the community the way Reddit has recently, users wouldn’t be reduced to protests and hoping that management listen, they could just spin up new instances, mirror the content, and carry on like nothing happened.
The big, bad instance could just disable federation and all communities and user accounts would be locked on that instance.
There’s a ton of other messengers and there’s WhatsApp but as long as my family doesn’t move from WhatsApp I’m stuck with it.