User accounts are fragmented and just because you signed on at lemmy.world doesn’t mean your account exists on lemmy.ca.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
Communities are fragmented and /c/games on lemmy.world is completely different than the one on lemmy.ml with its own users, set of posts, etc.
Lemmy does not currently allow for instance or user migration.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3057
Nor does it allow for shared communities (ie the aforementioned /c/games is unified across multiple instances)
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3100
We are in the early days. If you’re eager feel free to join in the development on these any many other core issues. There’s real potential here.
One becomes dominant which is then tied to an instance and there goes your federation you’re all clamouring about. Man I’m enjoying Lemmy so far but Jesus there’s a lot of you need pulling your heads out your asses. It’s a cool platform and a cool idea but damn there’s a lot of core issues that need addressing.
One community will be become dominant. It’s just the way things go. And it’s better for the user - why would we want discussions for some particular topic fragmented? It’s early days so some communities have competitors but one will be slightly bigger, more people will gravitate towards that, and the effect will compound.
As for federation yes a community is owned by an instance, sometimes a big instance.
But there’s no reason we wouldn’t have communities across a variety of instances. We already do. Most are on big instances sure since they have most users who create most communities, but there’s several larger communities on smaller instances. Like !houseplants@mander.xyz or !startrek@startrek.website
What you’re describing as an “issue” is just the way the fediverse works.
There’s no central authority that determines the ruling /c/gaming instance or whatever.
If you tried to create one then anyone could just fork lemmy to disregard the central authority.
Lemmy is not reddit, nor should it attempt to be.
The benefit of federation isn’t that no community becomes dominant for it’s field, it’s that there is no central authority. It’s open source, so if a change is accepted that makes apps pay a ton for API access (random example), a fork can be made to roll back that change and servers can switch to the fork. It also means that if one server goes down, the rest doesn’t go with it, or one wild admin can’t destroy everything.
If one server becomes dominant for one thing and they fuck it up eventually, a new community can be created. This isnt a feature of federation though. The same thing can (and did) happen on Reddit. There are huge benefits to federation, but that isn’t one. Segregation of communities also isn’t one.
Imho a better option, which I’m sure if Lemmy is successful will get there, is a central app but with a public codebase and a federated ownership. A central platform owned by the people for the people.
