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.

  • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    You are correctly understanding the downside of federation, i.e., instead of just having one “world news” community, you could have multiple. If you subscribe to them all, you could see duplicated posts across them all, or you might miss things if you only subscribe to one, etc… These are the downsides.

    There are upsides to this model too. Let me illustrate with a story in recent history. The mods of  196@lemmy.blahaj.zone were unhappy with some of their admin’s decisions. If this were reddit, they would be shit out of luck, because the admins are the same across all of reddit. Not so in the threadiverse! So the mods decided to hop instances to lemmy.world.

    To make a long story short, now there are at least three “196” communities, with two of them thriving: the original 196, which moved back to lemmy.blahaj.zone by popular demand, the onehundredninetysix community, which sprung up by popular demand when the mods of the original comm left blahaj, and 196@lemmy.world, which was the new home of the 196 mods for a short while, and persisted amongst those who wanted to stay on lemmy.world.

    I feel like I’m describing the migration of the elves in the Simarilion.

    And this is not to mention how Piefed and Mbin, etc, can also have communities that split the audience.

    So tl;dr, yes this splits the audience, but in the end gives communities the freedom to choose which mods and admins they want, instead of getting stuck with unpopular mods or admins.