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.
@Deceptichum I guess it would if it’s super important to you to be able to discuss any given post with the biggest possible number of people (which kbin’s crosspost feature already fixes, because it shows you how many comments are on an article’s crossposts and links you to them).
But I quite like some of the smaller discussion communities. Worrying about there being several on a topic isn’t any different to worrying about how reddit had several subs on the same topics.
Things are developing their own flavour already. It has to happen organically. I get the feeling from what people are saying that flaws in discovery is the main issue.