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.
Even though, it’s a risk, for example !rpg@ttrpg.network and ttrpg@lemmy.blahaj.zone are two communities for the same niche which despite having different ambiences split the communities.
That said, you can follow both (they’re small so you can follow more than on reddit) and if one has a moderation/culture not pleasing you, you can move to the other one.
Fundamentally, not different from reddit having different guitar communities under different names as the main onc became a shithole.
You can also close a community to redirect it toward another one in order to limit duplicates
@Ziggurat
This. It’s no different to that, and the decentralization also makes it easier to find the alternative communities because they don’t have to run off and call it “trueguitar” or something.