And that's exactly what's supposed to happen. Instance wars and eventual defederation and fragmentation are important moderation tools, and will progress the culture and feel of instances and regions of the Fediverse. Many instances will form federated [cliques](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory) that are highly connected and have similar vibes and cultures, and some will be federated with multiple cliques, showing users a variety of cultures and situations.

If the Fediverse reaches a large enough number of people, it can support multiple independant cliques, and enable users see entire mini-universes with different communities and vibes.

There is nothing better than a good old tribe war.

The biggest problem with lemmy and decentralization right now is that for optimal performance you need to spread out the load relatively evenly between instances. The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there) and that naturally leads to clumping on one or few instances which causes it to overload.

The way to solve it is to avoid having generic "anything goes" instances and instead have instances be focused on a specific topic. For example, have gaming instance, a personal finance/investing instance, all things home ownership and improvement instance, etc. You can have multiple communities per instance as long as they stay within the same general topic. This way users will naturally spread out by subscribing to different instances based on topics they're interested in. And that will solve the performance issue we're seeing with lemmy.world or other popular instances.

"Instance wars" sounds like the way "the consequences of my own actions" will be framed at a point.

The far right instances dripping with hate, bigotry and recycled propaganda will be in an "Instance war" with the mainstream instances talking about regular human being stuff - stuff like beans.

Grab your samurai swords, mall ninjas... and inventory your powdered eggs, theocratic fascist doomsday preppers...

The instance wars are coming for your unvaccinated, homeschooled, incel butts!

Were there mailserver wars?

Technically Truth and Gab are activitypub compatible right? We can already fight with them

I remember the war between /r/me_irl and /r/meirl back in the day on Reddit

Me_irl gang for life personally 😤

I have been running a Mastodon instance since like 2016/17 and this has been quietly happening for the entire time I've been on the fediverse. (I can't check the exact date right now as I'm in the middle of upgrading it.)

Do you want to be in the Anime Girl Who Posts Nazi Memes Fediverse? How about the Queer Furry Fediverse? Or maybe you'd rather be in the Mocking Shitposts Fediverse? Perhaps you want the Everyone Has A Photo Of A Human And Thinks Federating With Facebook's Activitypub Is Actually A Good Idea Fediverse? Or how about the TERF/Gender-Critical Fediverse? Or the "Standalone" Social Site That Is Actually A Fediverse Instance With Federation Disabled And The Credits Removed In Violation Of The Source License?

Some of these Fediverses will happily talk with others. Some of them will rapidly defederate from others as soon as they encounter a place that clearly belongs to a Fediverse they are incompatible with. Some of them quickly get defederated from the Fediverses they are incompatible with. Some of them look at the #fediblock tag, some to keep aware of places worth pre-emptively blocking to make a chill place to talk, some to look for fellow people who have been cast out of someone else's chill zones.

Isn't it already? Lemmygrad, exploding-heads and other extremist instances have already been defederated. But the main feature is the federation itself, which also creates powerful alliances between instances with common values. Platform-wise, it will be just a matter of difference of use and leaning, but federation alliances will work the same

Don't we kinda already have them?

It is absolutely already a thing

This will likely follow a similar pattern to email, since it's starting from a very similar position.

At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person. People do that with cars, shoes, and yes, even email domains.

From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I've yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn't need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn't even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.

Once upon a time, email worked this way, too. Then came the spammers, scammers, and other bad actors, and this was deemed untenable. Nowadays, any email provider that allows anonymous signup is likely to be blocked by most of the email-using world. You won't be able to use them to sign up for other services, and you might not even have your mail accepted by other providers.

This will definitely become a problem as Lemmy becomes popular, and instance admins will need to crack down, lest they be overrun and defederated by the rest of the world.

I'm not sure what the answer is. This is a problem that has not been adequately solved, IMHO. A few bad apples spoil the bunch. That's been true since long before the Internet.

I think it would be better if everybody selfhosted a instance of their own. Make it super hard and complicated to find communities but, keep things nice and clean

sounds lit. do you all take butter and salt with your popcorn?