Not the person you replied to but personally I’d like to see some kind of random communities feature so I can discover new ones.

Most of the stuff I see is memes or US politics that I’m just not interested in.

Realistically most people aren’t going to make their own instance, so you kind of have to rely on the good will of others.

Purely as an example, let’s say that Lemmy world decides they no longer want to be federated with ML because of the Meta situation. If you’re on either world or ML now you’ve lost access to huge sections of Lemmy. This could basically go on forever, so any instance that wants to remain neutral can be locked out of either both or one of them as they keep defederating from instances until the whole thing becomes a walled garden, basically the same as if you upset a power mod on Reddit and lose access to huge sections of the site, except it’s worse on here because you wouldn’t even be able to lurk.

I guess you could just have multiple accounts, but we could easily see a situation where you need like 10 accounts just to see the most popular instances, which is obviously ridiculous and not practical unless you’re terminally online.

It seems like a pretty huge flaw in the system, to be honest. Theoretically it’s a good idea, but as more and more people flock to the large instances it seems like it’s only a matter of time before the power plays start to happen.

Is there anything at all to stop that happening? It’s seems inevitable to me that eventually the whole thing will fall apart if people abuse the system.

Isn’t it creating a situation of Reddit power mods on steroids? It’s easy to say “well go and make accounts on multiple instances”, but it’s creating additional barriers to entry that a lot of people won’t understand and frankly is kind of irritating as a user.

I feel like people aren’t taking the consequences seriously and that defederating needs to be viewed as like a nuclear option that’s avoided unless absolutely necessary. That’s what I get from the additional information you provided.

This place will become completely unusable in the future if the good will dies out and large instances decide to defederate from each other to try and become the “top” instance, especially as more and more casual users move over.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t understand the point in defederating. Aren’t you just cutting down on the amount of content you can see? As a user I’d personally prefer to pick and choose what I can see.

What’s the actual upside in doing it? Obviously I can see why you’d want defederating from say a far right instance, but in general it seems like only downsides.

I’m new to all this so maybe I’m missing a crucial bit of information.

The problem is people will still just use Etsy rather than going direct to the business, even if going direct is significantly cheaper, because it’s easier.

You see it with fast food deliveries as well. People would rather just order through just eat or deliveroo rather than ringing the place up and saving quite a decent amount on their order for both themselves and the local restaurant.

Unfortunately people just want convenience these days.