I’m a reddit refugee trying to figure this out. It seems to me like it’s a decent idea to break up countrol like this, but unfortunately there are some inherent problems that mean it might not work in the real world.

The biggest in my view is that communities are scoped to the instance they started in. You could have 2 different communities with the same niche and the same or similar name but different insurances and the subscriber numbers will be split across them. I think this is damaging to growth because it spreads active users.

Eventually if the niche grows one of the communities of the niche will be the biggest and most active. So generally users will consolidate around the instances with the most active communities thus making those instances have a lot of control and defeating the purpose of federation.

Is there something I’m missing here? Because currently I’m not convinced this can both grow and keep things decentralized.

  • livus@kbin.social
    52·
    1 year ago

    @droning_in_my_ears it’s okay, you’re just still thinking in the old way (so are some of the commenters in here). Once you get your head around this, you’ll see it.

    You could have 2 different communities with the same niche and the same or similar name but different insurances and the subscriber numbers will be split across them. I think this is damaging to growth because it spreads active users.

    Okay here’s what you’re missing: the active users are active in multiple of them at the same time. Where something is hosted no longer matters.

    Take my news as an example, I subscribe to world news on my own instance kbin.social and on lemmy.world, on beehaw, and on lemmy.ml. When I view my Subscriptions I see all of them in my daily feed and I vote and comment in all of them.

    And on Kbin we have Collections (like multireddits) which means I also have a multi news feed with news communities from dozens of communities on many different instances.

    The beauty of it is, if an instance gets ruined by a Spez-like figure it doesn’t matter because federation.

    So generally users will consolidate around the instances with the most active communities thus making those instances have a lot of control

    You do at the moment see a lot of reddit-like behaviour with users clustering in .world, but this is not actually a problem and confusion about “where everyone is” is just a growing pain. Communities will grow or shrink or develop, find their place in the fediverse ecosystem.