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.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    181·
    10 months ago

    You can follow and interact with communities on other instances. The split doesn’t have to happen.

    On Reddit you have the same phenomenon, but it’s less obvious because there’s no server name. When r/ceilingfans has drama, someone creates r/fansonceilings, and then someone creates r/ceilingfanpics for both communities to share pictures in, but the split group doesn’t like interacting with the old group so creates r/picsofceilingfans.

    Eventually the fringe subreddits bleed dry and the old subreddits get left behind.

    On Lemmy the communities don’t die as quickly, because different serves have different rules. You can say things on sh.itjust.works that will get you banned on beehaw, and the moment any kind of communism/socialism comes up, there’s a big difference between the moderation on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.

    In my experience, most Lemmy communities are concentrated on communities on bigger servers.

    I don’t think Lemmy will scale well, but that’s probably more because of the UI, servers breaking apps whenever they update, and the lack of moderators.