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 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.