If some random dude comes in and opens a new instance, and then it comes out that this dude willingly associates with white supremacists, is a known creep, and even had a hand in an actual real life genocide, everybody would defederate without a second thought.

But suddenly that dude is Facebook and has a shit ton of money and everybody is just wait and see.

I don’t think the interesting issue is why not centralization. There’s tons of better explanations out there, but seriously, just “Elon Musk” is enough to explain why centralization is bad.

But the post does raise an interesting issue IMHO, and it is the lack of good explanation as to why federation between different platforms with different paradigms. Why federation between different Mastodon servers is obvious. Why federation between Mastodon and Calckey and whatever else is obvious too. Same with federation between different Lemmy instances, or between Lemmy and Kbin. It just makes sense. What is not clear is why we want/need/like federation between Lemmy and Mastodon. Sure, you can post in a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but it sucks. You can follow a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but the experience isn’t great either.

I do think there are good reasons for this, but I haven’t thought enough about it to articulate it properly. My thinking is that while a Mastodon-like service federating with a Lemmy-like service doesn’t seem to make much sense, Mastodon federating with a Facebook-like service does make sense. And I’m not sure if a Facebook-like thing federating with Lemmy makes sense, but I can definitely imagine something sitting somewhere in the middle between those two. And also, perhaps more importantly, we don’t want to erect artificial walls between the different ActivityPub services. Sure, the Mastodon-Lemmy integration sucks, and maybe it shouldn’t exist, but probably nobody will use it much, exactly because it sucks. But if we add a thing saying “no you can’t do it”, then we start needing to define borders between different services. Is microblogging different from blogging? What about a Facebook-like wall? Or a tumblr-like feed? Are those different enough from each other to be different services? Who wants to be the one defining those borders? I think the current solution, where anything is possible and integrations that don’t make sense just don’t happen organically, is the best.

But still, that is a way more itneresting question than just “why federation”.

I don’t even think it’s a difference with Reddit. Reddit also has community duplication. Sure, maybe not as bad, but it’s there. Compare /r/meirl to /r/me_irl. The only difference is that in Fediverse you’ll see the same community name in different instances, but is it really that much more confusing than the meirl case?

There is, yes, a lack of discoverability for communities. Maybe we need a “recommend me a community” community. Like “I’m looking for a Spanish speaking science fiction community”, and people can say “oh, yeah, try this one”.

Other than that, the main advantage Reddit has in this area is that it has had a more or less stable population for a very long time, so which community wins out out of an initial set has already been resolved, while this is younger (yes, it’s been around for a couple of years, but most people here haven’t) and therefore that process is just starting to play out.