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.
or not 🤷♂️
Sure it’s more practical, but your whole community (as in “people”) is now centralized on a single point. If you have a single one “gaming” community, and it disappears or is taken over, you lose everything and need to start over from scratch. If you have 3-4 communities spread across different instances, if one of those communities become unusable, it’s easier to abandon it to become active on the next one.
Decentralization is not a silver bullet, but as we’ve seen during the last year with Twitter and Reddit, it’s better than the alternative. Nothing prevents you to subscribe to several similar communities, each with its own flavor, and participate in the one(s) you want.
It would be cool to be able to just combine the content at the user level. You could have all the gaming communities you like under a custom gaming label, with a filter that checks for duplicate titles or links (wouldn’t be perfect but decent) and imports in the comments from duplicate threads (with some subheadings or something to distinguish their origin)
Why couldn’t one of the communities abandoned just be dropped from the ‘group’ then. Or have Moderators from several communities work together to moderate a larger one. They are still federated, just working together. If one becomes obsolete, defederate it or let it be. Why should I have to be subscribed to the same topic several times to find the discussion?