0x1C3B00DA

Cool. I'm glad you're getting a fairly smooth experience, but that hasn't been my experience or others'. I've seen posts with only a few comments but on their home server they have whole comment trees that I didn't see. Vote counts can be around 10-20 on one server and greater than 100 on another.

If the system does not depend on a central authority

In your example of coalescing on a single community, the mods of that community are the central authority.

it’s easy to coordinate a move away.

It's not even easy to coordinate everyone moving to a single community. This issue has been discussed in various forms for more than 3 years and we haven't seen this supposed consolidation of communities. Coordinating anything in a decentralized way is never easy.

That doesn’t bother me, and I truly don’t understand why it should bother others. I am not going to write only if I am optimizing reach or I know a priori if the people are going to approve.

Cool. It doesn't bother you. Then just keep doing what you're doing. If we ever get a solution to it implemented, you won't care but the rest of us will be happy for it. If you don't care, why are you all over this thread arguing about this?

This isn't about maximizing reach of our posts. It's about consolidating discussion so that communities (especially those with more niche appeal) can have a sustainable userbase and not die out from lack of activity.

Go for the most active one

There isn't one "most active one" because federation isn't perfect and every instance sees a different number of users/posts.

The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.

You can't guarantee that. If they are on a smaller instance, their instance may not be aware of the larger community/instance.

I think decentralized systems are much better than centralized systems, but they're inherently more difficult. Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn't decentralized. My proposal, which the third solution in the article is based on, enhances decentralization by allowing duplicate communities to exist but consolidate the userbase and discussion.

Reddit has a large enough userbase that duplicate communities can each reach a sustainable size without interfering. The fediverse userbase isn't large enough to sustain even a single community for some topics, let alone duplicates. I'm in plenty of communities where there are lots of low value posts that would normally be consolidated into a single stickied post for the community but there isn't a large enough userbase to make a stickied post worthwhile despite there being multiple communities for that topic.

Also, reddit is a centralized system. A decentralized system is going to have problems that a centralized one doesn't

I submitted a proposal to lemmy a while ago to fix this and it was closed. I rewrote the proposal as a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal and a lemmy dev said on the discussion thread that they would not implement it and don't see an issue with duplicate communities.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d36d-sharing-content-across-federated-forums/3366

I don’t think there is even activity enough to worry about those things yet.

This problem is part of why there's not enough activity. Any activity that happens in the threadiverse is spread across multiple, duplicate communities. That makes it harder for communities to build up active userbases and makes users themselves less likely to post or comment.

no just like federating with mastodon.social doesn't make your instance a part of the Gargron fediverse. Meta can't control non-Meta instances that federate with them

This is nonsense. The fediverse isn't cryptocurrency. Having 51% of the fediverse doesn't give you any more control than having 1%. If your instance(s) implement a feature that the rest of the fediverse doesn't like, they can defederate.

Other instances either react by defederating, but because they only have 49 percent, due to network effects, they get extinct

If 49% of the fediverse defederates from the other 51%, it is now 100% of a new, smaller fediverse. You can't just claim that "network effects" will cause them to go extinct. Whether those instances have enough userbase to sustain a cohesive network depends on the actual number of instances/users. And the fediverse has sustained itself for over a decade with less than the current ~2 million accts and most of that time it had substantially less than 1 active accts.

It’s not sustainable to keep offering poorly designed solutions. People need to understand some basic things about the system they're using. The fediverse isn't a private space and fediverse developers shouldn't be advertising pseudo-private features as private or secure.

Sure, but that's already solved on the fediverse by using HTTP Signatures and isn't related to Authorized Fetch.

I downvoted because they posted about an intentionally non-federated forum in the fediverse community. The post doesn't belong here.

and having a bot thrashing a server indexing everything

This is a completely separate argument and one that we already have mechanisms for. Servers can use status codes and headers to warn about rate limits and block offenders.

It is also one thing to read/interact with a site as that adds value to the site as a whole

A search index adds value as well; that's why this keeps coming up. And, again, there are existing mechanisms to handle this. A robots.txt file can indicate you don't want to be crawled and offenders can be IP blocked