Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don’t find appealing (there’s even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).
We don’t want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
To be honest, the whole reddit thing didn’t affect me one bit, I never modded anything, never used 3rd party apps, always used the official app. I just thought that, yes, this does seem like a good idea, I don’t do any of those things, but apparently, a lot of people do and they like using those apps/tools, so, yeah, I’ll try this new thing, it’s opens source, it’s federated, no big brother hanging over your sholder… turns out, for my needs, it’s worse than what reddit was. For starters, I don’t need to have 3 main accounts just so that I can see all of the content of all of the communities I’d like to subscribe to. Second, I don’t have to open up new communities and moderate them and upload content, like I had to do now. And last, reddit actually tracks what I do. I know, that sounds bad, but I actually like it. Why? Because it remembers if I was active in a certain sub the last 2, 3, 4 days and the first feeds it gives me is from that sub, which I like, apparently I stayed over there for quite a while the last time I was active, which means I find it’s content interesting. Lemmy doesn’t have that. Call it evil, I call it a feature.
That makes sense. Reddit is a fully featured product. The interesting thing about open source projects for me, is that they’re slower to develop new features in the short term, but as more and more people come around, the breadth and scale of features can outpace commercial products, because anybody can contribute for any reason. To be honest, if you find the current state of things intolerable, maybe just wait a bit? As more people adopt and start contributing, things will get more polished. I’m almost certain the current defederation thing is just growing pains. As more tools get developed for people to customize their experience, as is the trend for open source, things will get better.
Maybe, we’ll see… I’ll stick around, but just to see how things turn out. My prediction is not as positive as yours, but I hope I’m wrong.