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.

  • DessertStorms@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    First challenge is to find out, what such communities could even be named. My search-fu is weak so I might only find one such community, but there are others, bigger ones. How could I find them?

    Ask.
    If you found one you’ve found people who would know about others.
    If you’ve found none, almost every instance now has an askkbin/asklemmy/askwhatever, and someone there will know.
    If no one knows, it probably doesn’t exist and you could make it yourself if you were so inclined.

    Intuitively I would definitely want to join the biggest

    both you and OP (and so so many others who are used to reddit, and capitalism in general, but I digress) seem fixated on constant growth, and more on the size of the community, than the quality of it. I think that’s probably an issue you need to resolve with yourselves, rather than try to apply it to something like the fediverse.