Big communities are fun (which you can get more easily when things are centralized), but communities under the control of a unbalanced billionaire, or a CEO desperately trying to make his business profitable before the bills come due... that's not nice.

Federation is cool because it's flexible. You can still have really big instances, but small ones are out there too, and if something goes wrong with the big ones, you can just shift to the smaller ones without the community shattering.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

@merc yup completely agree. Reminds me a bit of the internet before social media.

I also like that you can pick the UI that works for you. For an example, I’m viewing Lemmy communities on mastodon because I like playing around with the Twitter-esque layout. But someone else might prefer the Reddit format, etc.