This is the world wide social web as it should have been.

This is my stance too - we took a wrong turn letting initially utopian tech companies create vast eyeball-farming dystopias when the natural progression from forums and blogs is breaking them out of their silos (not building bigger ones) and letting them talk to each other.

This isn’t Reddit. Full stop. And it’s not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It’s not “Reddit, but different”. It’s a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It’s very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.

Indeed. It's early days still and the Reddit diaspora has shaped the initial growth but, as it spreads beyond that, it will expand and mutate. Already kbin have a kind of forum/microblogging thing going and it will be interesting to see how things evolve from here. With better moderation tools, I could see people skipping setting up their own forum and blog and just spinning up an instance instead - there are too many advantages to not do it. That'll drag in a more diverse group of people with different needs and requirements that will push development in new directions. I, for one, can't wait to see where this all goes.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but there already exists a proposal to make communities work more like a cloud.

It's just a matter of time before Lemmy and Kbin implement this.

Websites are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.

Federated instances can be like web service providers, only limiting malicious content from users. The magazines/communities are like web sites on a particular host, such as WordPress. They control the content within their scope.

What you are suggesting is that instances should be like AOL, curating the experience. Which is fine if some of them want to do that, but it shouldn't be the standard.

To use a somewhat stretched analogy. Instances should be like bitcoin miners, I don't need to know much about them individually at all. My only concern is that there isn't a majority miner/instance.

It doesn't have to be a reddit clone, but the federation needs to move to a more mandatory model, and one that puts the content first. The current system is far too user hostile to allow anything but the lowest common denominator of communities.