Agreed. Federation is really, really nice for people who can grasp the concept quickly and bend the systems to their will, but its feeling like we may need some sort of intermediary step that allows power users to also help with outside discovery a bit.

Everyone seems to be getting the grasp of local communities easily enough, but being able to participate/pull down content from other sites and discovering them seems to be a big pain point. Lemmy has a better discoverability than most, but whichever sites can figure out how to do good UX for discoverability is gonna get a big leg up.

and my axe

"wholesome"

It's not pointless, it's just......not Reddit. Decentralization offers a different approach than they do. All the Reddit exiles come seeking a central authority but lemmy exists explicitly to remove that from the equation, that's the entire point of the project. There are people working on single server Reddit clone-ish alternatives that may be more your speed, and that's perfectly fine. Also, for the record, if you want ALL of the c/aww (or whatever) you can just follow every c/aww you come across from 6 different instances, you don't have to pick one and forsake all others.

In regards to your other point, It's also important to remember that the developers of Lemmy consider it to be in alpha IIRC, and the system is currently facing loads they wouldn't have dreamed of a few weeks ago. It's a learning curve for literally everyone involved but the smart techy people behind it all are working hard to flesh out a stable system for everybody to enjoy as they see fit with no central authority.

It'll sort itself out naturally. One will become dominant, and it'll be your link factory

Nah, it's more than that. It's a way of decentralizing power and becoming resistant to control.

It doesn't start or end with Lemmy - you could build Remmy, join it to the network, and somehow group up these communities and present them to the users as a single group. You could build Kenny because you're suspicious of the Lemmy devs, and help users migrate away from them (taking their content with them). You could make the server ad supported, make one for your students to speak amongst themselves semi privately, you could make one dedicated to LLMs

Hell, Reddit could decide to join the network and try to take it over, and each server owner could decide if they want to let them try or limit communication with them.

At the end of the day, you can only get so much control. Because while there are benefits to being on a specific server, ultimately anyone can spin up a new one and their users get access to a social network that includes all its members, and if instead of one animemes most users sub to 4 smaller ones, you again have less power in any one place

There's also the moderation aspect - no matter how good your tools, mods can only manage so much. Push past a certain point, and even with large teams you're going to get inconsistent moderation and a lot of resentment from it. But with smaller groups, mods can be closer to their members, and groups who don't want any moderation can have it their way - they just might be blocked from a server if the admin thinks they're going to ruin things

I mean, there's also already instances being blacklisted from the bigger Lemmy servers - they're not cut off from the network, but the instances don't talk directly to each other anymore.

And while we're very likely to see some consolidation, I think a lot of us would resist if the groups grew to rival front page subreddits.

I'd like to see science and technology go in that direction because I'll deal with flat earthers if it means I can see all the best takes from subject matter experts (and it's easy to tell the difference), but current events? Already I was on r/animetitties instead of the main news subs, because they have a very strong tendency towards polarization

I just want to say thanks for this discord analogy. It is way more accurate and effective than that "email" analogy I've been seeing

I suggested this in a different thread, but I think it would be cool to be able to create and share feeds surrounding a topic. All the posts from the communities that are included in the feed show up there, and you can share that feed with other people so they don't need to do all the hard work of discovery themselves.

Surely the devs are already looking at something like this.

It might be, but a number of Reddit communities did that via CSS as well and forums before that didn't even have voting systems at all.

Time will tell. Part of the excitement of all this is going to be watching how everything develops

And then they build their own cottages, and mcmansions, and apartment blocks, along with all the noise and detritus... and now your cozy little cottage is just a house in bustling village