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.
It’s no different than Reddit with the exception that the main container for the posts isn’t a singular thing. There are many containers that can all contain the same posts simultaneously, and talk to each other to also share votes and comments.
This post isn’t on my instance, but I am able to see it, and comment all the same and everyone else on any other instance that sees this post should be able to see my comment as well.
It’s easier to think of it as having 2 layers of subreddits. The first layer is the instance you’re on; the main site you log into and peruse the content and functionally the same as “reddit.com,” but spread out over multiple servers and even controlled by different admins. The second layer is the communities themselves, which are functionally the same as subreddits.