I think federation and decentralization work well for email and text-messaging platforms like XMPP and Matrix because those platforms inherently benefit from being decentralized. They work almost seamlessly with federation.
Forums, on the other hand, don’t really need a federated system. Just look at Lemmy and how many communities defederate from one another because of ideological disagreements. When there’s that much defederation, the entire concept starts to feel pointless. Suddenly, you can’t use your account across “Lemmy” because several instances have decided they don’t like each other anymore.
If this much fragmentation is going to happen naturally, how is federation supposed to be the sustainable future of forums?
I think this is a fair criticism of federated forums. You don’t see this same level of fragmentation with email or text messaging.
Centralized but well-moderated forums are what really matter. Federation doesn’t protect good or useful speech, quality moderation does. And by its nature, Lemmy lacks that.
Let’s see. I’m afraid it would go the same way than Discuit and Tildes: there’s motivation at first as the userbase grows, then after a while the motivation drops and the project gets stagnant.
Idk about tildes, but discuit since beginning the founder himself always moving too slow, this is why i abandoned it early
Tildes has recently announced they will not add any more features nor actively seek new members and will simply die if that’s where it’s headed.
Chad is an odd dude.
They really have potential when reddit exodus began and i really don’t mind tildes dont have image upload featured, but tildes refusal to open sign up made me realize tildes basically serves as deimos’s playground
Such a shame they guy that making rif app wasting his time developed app for that turd
I think that is not the reason. No mod logs, Chad as the sole admin and mod, and bans without reason.
If you delete Chad, make Tildes moderation open, and add actual moderation not banning because poor Chad got his feelings hurt you got a great app.
It is pretty easy to get in, I think adopting Lobsters’ user tree might be a better option though.