this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2023
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Here's the thing about federated content from a reddit perspective (as I get it currently, please correct)
Your favorite subreddits will be splintered across servers. Mods for those subreddits will be controlled by the server admins. This is the same system. Except that when a sever decides to enact a bad policy in those subreddits at the admin level, it does not infect other subreddits outside that server.
And your criticism has always been true of reddit btw. People ditch one subreddit for another. Or avoid r/all at all costs. So this shouldn't be much different I wouldn't think.
Indeed, Reddit can do the "fragmentation" thing as well. But the big difference is that you can never escape the admins, all subreddits are ultimately under the same top bosses. And you can't "defederate" with, say, /r/conservative to effectively cause everyone over there to cease to exist as far as your own subreddit is concerned.
Whether this is better or worse is going to be interesting to see play out.
I'd say better. Only one thing could very easily break the system in my opinion and that would be everyone sticking to just one server anyways. Because then it allows the server to be targeted by say, movie studios, for people sharing clips of their movie. And then changes might happen in response to affect too many users. Or if monetization becomes a problem. Even then though, I don't see a huge problem if everyone learns their lesson. Because again, if you don't like a specific subreddit about Lord of the Rings and you don't want to join their Tolkienite cult, you can block it out. Or block the whole server its on. And yet if a specific server is hostile to LoTR, you'd still be able to find their content elsewhere.
One of my concerns is about a real de-centralised system not being implemented, as i learned. Migration of users and communities is not possible. Therefoe partial meltdowns are still possible.