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.
Kbin has gone some way towards that through collections (like multireddits).
It’s a bit of a gamechanger tbh. Example news topic feed here.
That’s a good start, but I think most people just want it to work. They don’t want to take the time to curate it all themselves.
@XbSuper I didn’t know anyone on reddit who doesn’t subscribe to any subs. No one just sits on All the whole time. This is no different.
The cool thing about Collections is you don’t have to curate them yourself. The people who do, can choose to share them as public (like the ones I’ve been linking to in here) and clicking follow adds them to your feed.
That’s pretty cool, I haven’t tried out Kbin yet, might have to check it out!
@betabob yeah give it a whirl. I have accounts all over the place but this one quickly became my main.