this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I don't agree. If I like LOTR and giraffes I don't want to create an account on both "instance groups". I want to do like today and create a single account, then subscribe to the communities I am interested in wherever they are.
To me it sounds like you are sort of mixing up community location and community discovery. This is sort of the case right now because instances have a list of local communities but I think that it is best that they are separated. For example on Reddit I don't generally find new communities by scanning the entire list of communities. I usually find them when someone mentions a related community in a comment of a community that I am already in. Or when I stumble across a community when searching the web. When you discover and subscribe to communities this way it doesn't really matter where they are hosted or if they are grouped. You can organically discover things that interest you over time (although I agree that it can be a bit slow to start).
But you don't have to create accounts on multiple instances. You can subscribe, post, and mod communities on other federated servers.
Then what happens when the owner of the giraffe instance goes all Spez on us?
Too much control is a bad thing. Let people spread those communities across all instances, otherwise I'll be asking:
How am I to live without my giraffes?!
What about when the owner of the general purpose instance closes the whole instance over some BS in the WhyIsThisIllegal community and now your girrafe gifs are collateral damage? You going to stick your neck out them then?
Of course I won't, but, the beauty of this is that you can just create another community in another instance. That way, my giraffe viewing party continues no matter where they reside.
But then what's the point of separating them into instances in the first place?
The full list of federated communities is getting too big to just scroll and find things, especially since I can't sort by name. I may not know what community name to search for. There's a lemmy.studio instance that someone started for music production topics. I can go list communities in that instance to see what I didn't realize I wanted to. It's all six of one, half a dozen of the other. We have general purpose and focused instances now, so everybody is free to choose which they want.
You can subscribe and post on different instances. But, I don't think all pertinent communities should be on one CENTRALIZED instance since that defeats the point of the Fediverse.