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.
To a certain extent it splits the audience, but that’s the intention behind federation - to allow communities split across instances to talk to one another.
The main reasons for doing this are:
It keeps server costs down. Bigger servers require bigger money, and the people running these servers are relying on donations, they’re not billionaires that can just keep expanding forever.
It prevents all our eggs being in one basket - if a server goes down, only the community on that server goes. All the other communities can continue, and may even have cached content from the downed server.
It prevents the same power imbalance thar Reddit have. If a host starts acting malicious, the community can move to a different instance.
I had the same concerns as OP, and you have pretty much convinced me. Well done.