- Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
- Support the hosts with our own funds.
- Moderate our own communities.
The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let’s own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.
About the “less fragmented” part.
I don’t see how that is possible in the fediverse.
Let’s say I like fishing and a fishing community exists in five instances… That fragmentation you can’t avoid… In the other hand it helps with the resilient part I guess. The more fragmented it is the harder it will be to take a community down.
Having multiple communities under the same subject in different instances will soon become normal, for better or for worse.
I have read some comments in github discussing possible ways to develop something akin to “mutireddits” (or more recently custom feeds) so people can group communities like this across different instances.
Let’s see how all this plays out. Interesting times ahead in the fediverse.
That makes me think having something like “federated communities” could be neat, where a community on one instance could opt in to have content mirrored/visible from a community in another instance. In practice it would be something like subscribing to a community on one instance essentially being equivalent to subscribing to multiple communities on different instances, but if there is disagreement on e.g. moderation practices moderators might decide to “defederate” the communities.
I’ve functionally mass-subscribed to every community that overlaps with my primary interests regardless of which instance it is on and make use of the feature to view submissions from subscribed communities.
The fragmentation is frustrating because it makes individual communities seem less populated than the topic actually implies. For example, there are multiple large Games communities across the biggest instances, but as they are not on the same instance, people are likely to participate in a subset of all of the available communities. This generally reduces the volume of participation in any one community, even if the volume across all those communities summed up is very substantial.
A “multireddit” at the community level would be quite nice (rather than the process of subscribing to a large number of communities and using the “subscribed” feed).
I like the idea of having first party support for joining communities across instances. That would relieve some pain points.
Though,human history has shown that we are largely incapable of promoting consistency without a governing body of some sort. Which necessitates some level of centralization.