Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.
With Lemmy, doesn’t it follow that similar communities on different instances will simply dilute the userbase, for example !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@beehaw.org. How do we best use lemmy as a (small c) community when a topic can be split amongst many (large C) Communities?
This is an earnest question, in no way am I suggesting lemmy is inferior to reddit. I’m quite enjoying myself here.
It’s a very good thing to avoid what happened on Reddit that a big istance is moderated by people that don’t think democratically and rule against other people’s will deleting posts and banning everyone they don’t like.
With federation, you can choose the instances and communities you like the most, the ones with better moderation and so the kindest one will probably prevail :)
This assumes that power doesn’t corrupt and that the big “kind” communities don’t eventually turn bad.
That’s exactly the point: if they become “bad”, we can always move to another one with the same name but on another instance
This is such a great feature and advantage.
Just to chime in, the other issue is consolidation of these communities by a small handful of people (i.e. powermods).
They’ve already started doing it here too, trying to grab all the keywords and popular communities (e.g. anime@lemmy.ml) so it’s something to keep note of moving forward too especially as certain instances start to see more growth than others.