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.
I’ve never heard of federated communities.
Keep in mind the fediverse is not lemmy. Lemmy is the software that allows you to read, post, and comment, but there are others like piefed.
The basic problem you’ve described is a potential problem, but in practice it’s not really significant.
I’ve never really cared much for the idea of “community” online and certainly on reddit. Like what is a community really other than a category of similar posts ? The idea that it’s the people that make the community and that you need one cohesive place or platform for that community to exist just isn’t accurate.
For example, every instance might have it’s own “selfhosted” community. If you search you’ll see a half dozen. Just subscribe to the few busiest like everyone else, and you’ll see all the posts. I guess what I’m saying is that “the community” informally exists across all instances.
The best thing about federation is that you can choose not to follow specific communities if you don’t want to support their content. Like maybe you’re into manga memes but you don’t want to support the lack of moderation on some instances.
I don’t know exactly how it works but piefed has a feature where if a post is a link to a news article then it will list the comment sections for all cross posts under one post. Something like that anyway, I’m not sure exactly how it works, but often when looking at a post for an article you’ll see comments from other posts of the same article.
This is such an underrated feature of PieFed, and it solves OP’s problem entirely.
I’m surprised I’m getting replies to the very first post I ever made because I edited it recently. On reddit you don’t get new activity from editing. Where are you even seeing this?
What? Edited posts dont disappear.
Do they surface to the top though?
No idea mate.
The fun thing is that since Lemmy, piefed, etc are open source, theoretically anyone could learn how the algorithms work…if they had the programming skills to understand the code.