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.
You are abbsolutly right, that’s one of the main problems I have with lemmy as well. I personally suggest a “multi-community” feature, like multi-reddits, so you can at least merge all the splintered communites again on the user end.
Having a client that merges the same article URL would also be helpful, as the same thing gets posted repeatedly but each time that happens, the comments are spread over them all, diluting the conversation.
Aren’t they federated so that doesn’t happen?
I’m currently following two other nostupidquestion communities, 3 asklemmy ones and about 5 news communities. This happens because of federation.
Does it happen automatically? I thought it did but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps this is why I feel it’s very quiet here.