cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12944261
The psychology of this problem is that users are too lazy to maintain multiple accounts when all they have is Lemmy’s stock web client. So they choose one of the big nodes: lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemm.ee, lemmy.ca, etc.
These Cloudflare-centralized nodes are able to greedily exploit the #networkEffect because due to lack of multi-account software. If there were some well-made 3rd party client apps for Lemmy that would be designed for multiple accounts, then more users would be willing to create accounts in more decentralized parts of the fedi.
Mastodon somewhat proves this because the client-side tooling is in place to make it convenient to have 6 or Mastodon accounts. And Mastodon nodes are better balanced.
I’m quite familiar with relays in the SMTP context which is not a context where an end user installs relays. An end user in that case would only direct their own software to use a relay that has been installed by a service provider in control of a server. So when you say install a Lemmy relay, I’m missing the concept. What exactly is a Lemmy relay? Can you walk me through this scenario: suppose someone is on Beehaw and they cannot reach node X because Beehaw defederated from node X. What are the steps for a Beehaw user to subscribe to a community that is hosted on node X?
If the instance has blocked another instance, then the user cannot do anything except change the instance, as his interests and those of the operator probably do not match.
A relay in fediverse is a server that receives messages from the instances connected to it and forwards them to all connected instances.
As an example, here are 2 realys that I manage:
It works for me without any problems: