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.
I think you’re misunderstanding the purpose of decentralization. We don’t decentralize in order to keep communities small. We decentralize so that normal people, the non-billionaires, can host Lemmy.
Let me explain. It starts with a simple premise: social media owned by companies can and will enshittify. If not right now, then they will in the future.
From this premise, we conclude that the only way to produce a healthy, self-sustaining social media is by having the people own it rather than a company. But this leads to a challenge: only companies and billionaires have the money to be able to host large social media sites. A large site requires a large server, and that requires a lot of money.
The Fediverse sidesteps this issue by only requiring people to have small servers, to keep costs low. But then that introduces a new problem, which is that small servers can’t host the sheer number of people required to promote discussions and communities. So, the Fediverse makes a second innovation: have the small servers communicate with each other and share information, so that as a collective, the sum of the small servers becomes large enough to host a healthy community of users.
We federate across multiple sites because if we were to all pile into a single site, it would overload that site, and the poor chap who’s running the server would have a terrible day trying to keep the site running.
The issue you’re noticing (having multiple communities of the same topic) isn’t really the intention of federation. That issue is just because a bunch of people from Reddit tried to make the same communities all at the same time without checking if the community already exists. The expectation is that, over time, communities with the same topic will consolidate, exactly as you predicted.
I really disagree that the expectation is that communities will consolidate.
I think many users including OP overstate the problems of “split communities” and understate the advantages of having similar communities on different instances.
Having a /c/opensource on both lemmy.world and lemmy.ml doesn’t meaningfully “split” the opensource community. Users can subscribe to all, some, or none as they wish. So what if you see the same post twice - it’d not ideal but not really a detractor. It’s not the same as say, forking an opensource project or having discussions on both IRC and matrix.