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.

  • livus
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    21 year ago

    Hmm one hack for you would be to take a look at the feeds for news collections on http://kbin.social/magazines/collections and get a sense of which are most active, then sub to them or block others.

    Or you could just pick the ones where you like the comments.

    I block all the big meme communities to improve my All.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      hmmm, ok, thanks, I’ll give that a shot. Pretty much all meme communities are already blocked here, that’s not an issue. The main problem with news communities is I’m trying to avoid subscribing to them so my subscribed feed is spared all the stressful content if I want a break from it, but I may have to compromise there.