Thanks for your response. I read it right away, but wanted to take time to reply properly.

You raise and expand on a couple really good (and important) points, that I think lead us down to an unfortunate ultimate conclusion. One that federation might survive, but that no monolithic platform possibly can.

It seems the best way to retain a community’s identity, constructiveness, and good faith is to keep is small and human-curated. Perhaps the ONLY way.

Which is understandable, but… also a real shame. It implies enshittification is actually inevitable - not just on the corporate side, but on the consumption side, too. One any collective becomes large enough that it reaches critical mass, their nuances and perspectives diffuse into a monolithic mob.

Things like voting systems, moderation guidelines etc… they’re really only capable of slowing down the inevitable. The system works in its infancy when ideas and populations are dispersed, but as time passes and they slowly collect into fewer and fewer key groups, they homogenise and radicalise, or split into individualised interest groups and echo chambers.

I see analogies for that in humans in general - in money and capital, in subcultures and conspiracies, in religions and spiritualities…

Humans haven’t been developed to live in networked communities this large. We’re not capable of comprehending populations this massive, we’re naturally-inclined to divide and sub-divide people into smaller and smaller categories so that we can label groups as Other according to their simplified descriptions.

In the case of Reddit, it means that like all social media platforms before it, and likely all platforms after… this is just part of its life cycle. It’s dramatic, but it is the nature of any sufficiently-large social platform to grow, lose quality as it gains quantity, reach critical mass… then rupture and slowly drain away its foul contents like a cyst.

Like a cyst, some platforms may drain on their own (MySpace), some never get large enough to and slowly disappear (Bebo), and some are lanced by their owners (Twitter). Some remain a foul abscess, on the precipice (Facebook).

Reddit may have been lanced, but its rot was inevitable, because it seems it is the amassing of people to the point of homogeneity that ultimately erodes the value of a platform. Whether it is lanced or dies a slow death is irrelevant; all is cyclical. We migrate, and migrate, and migrate; again and again we repeat ourselves.

What does that mean for kbin or Lemmy? It depends. If we recreate the monoliths by flocking to the largest instances - which we currently are, in kbin.social and lemmy.ml or beehaw.org - those larger instances will fester one day, too. The largest communities continue to draw yet more and more users, because we want to be around each other.

But there can at least be smaller ones, and we can use those smaller ones to see the largest ones. Smaller federated instances have the opportunity to remain small. A single federated server can fester, too. But the concept of federation itself at least will not. Users can live in their smaller communities, slowly secede from larger ones as they visibly evolve in ways that contrast their own home communities.

In this way, federated social communities may do either of the following:

1. maintain the inevitable cycle internally; larger instances collecting users, eventually festering - while smaller ones rise to replace them. Users will migrate, migrate, migrate - but within the familiarity of the federation, where they can transition more slowly.
2. undermine the cycle reactively; as larger instances start to become more absolute in comparison to home communities, users prioritise their homes. Being in smaller homes and larger federations gives better visibility to user-side enshittification, reducing the growth of larger instances. Federation means users can reduce their contact without cutting it entirely. Echo chambers will form, but no platform dies, merely evolves.