Because they are trapped there. A user account on Reddit remains on Reddit, it can't access communities outside of Reddit.

Creating a new account on kbin here was not exactly hard. Is your argument that millions of people still use Reddit because they can't type in a couple of data fields?

Then when Reddit goes bad and [email protected] starts sucking, I can just start posting on [email protected] instead. No need to create a new account or "migrate" anywhere. The friction is minimal.

Right, but then all of the other users that post interesting content that you went to [email protected] for are still on [email protected], not on your new instance. Now, your new instance gets zero posts because it's new, but the old instance still has millions of people posting to it every second of every day. Yeah, you have a new place to post to, but all of the content that you went to [email protected] for in the first place is still over there. Federation did nothing to help that problem.

You don't need to move to a different instance. I'm not sure where this miscommunication is coming from. You can continue using [email protected] if [email protected] "goes bad" and instead go hang out on some other startrek community without having to create a new account.

It's not miscommunication, it's just that I'm removing the option of changing to a different community/magazine on the same instance. If I can no longer stand being part of [email protected], I'm not going to start posting to [email protected], I'm going to the next largest community, which is, at this time, usually on a different instance all together, like [email protected]. I'm not talking about my user account, I'm talking about the community/magazine itself. If a mod on [email protected] goes crazy and starts banning people for talking about Star Trek: Discovery, I'm not going to want to be there, even if my account hasn't been banned, yet. As a result, I would need to find a new Star Trek community to post in, which is what I mean when I say I'd have to move to a different instance (because why would I switch to a different community/magazine on the same instance? And, also, there are a million scenarios where switching to a different community/magazine on the same instance would be a bad idea/impossible). Note that when I say community, I mean the equivalent of kbin's magazine, as Lemmy calls it a community.

Move to the smaller instance. Everyone else can move too. It's just as easy for them as for you. Then it becomes the bigger instance.

The entire reason I would subscribe to a community/magazine is because I enjoy interacting with the community there, and seeing/interacting with the content they post. If I switch to a smaller community/magazine, that content becomes exceedingly rare, and the number of people I can converse with drops dramatically. There are 315 subscribers to [email protected], but 241,000 subscribers to https://reddit.com/r/electricvehicles. Clearly, the experience of posting to one vs. the other is drastically different, wouldn't you say? Why would I go to a place where I have just a few people to talk with, when I could stay on the old site that has thousands upon thousands of people? The same applies to if it were 5 years from now and [email protected] has 241,000 users but [email protected] has 315: no one will want to switch if the mods of the larger community/magazine turn into assholes.

If it's "bad enough" for you to move but not for them to move, perhaps you're being more sensitive to the badness than everyone else is. Maybe it's not so bad. If it is that bad, then why aren't they moving?

So now it's, "if most people don't move, it's not really that bad, or it's your fault for thinking it's bad"?

Basically I want a mailing list feature, but one that mimics Reddit's UI. We already do this with websites (there are registrars and DNS servers that aren't controlled by any one organization), so why can't we do it with content? Share content with every instance as it's posted, as referenced by a "DNS server"-like setup, and bam, done. Each instance can moderate the content how they see fit, and if one instance decides to be dicks about it, users can switch to a different instance and have literally the exact same community and the exact same content as they had before the previous instance owners became dicks.

You're right, but the current tradition and momentum are towards using short display names; virtually every service that has a public-facing feature uses display names (even most email clients put the first and last name of the users instead of their actual email addresses).

We definitely should be using the full bit on kbin/lemmy, though, as it's so critical to the idea of the Fediverse, you're 100% correct on that.

That is an entirely valid point, and one I do like. The worst part of that is having to wade through duplicate posts, which isn't the end of the world, I suppose.

Well said.

Sure, but that's no different from switching to a different subreddit, in the current case of Reddit.

Which doesn't really happen. The mods of r/news are idiots, but only a tiny number of users actually care about that. Most people either just stop using r/news, or deal with it. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of how things should be. Hell, the only time I've seen people switch subreddits is when everyone went from r/antiwork to r/workreform after that disaster of a TV interview; even then, the former currently has 2.6 million subscribers, the latter has 700k, so it appears even that migration was a failure. I can't imagine this is seen as a good solution.

Not really. No more work than posting on a different community on the same instance.

People don't want to post in two communities that cover the same topic. Duplicating work like that leads people to seek out a single solution, even if it's the worse solution. Reddit is so popular because it has a giant number of people posting content to subreddits all the time, meaning even niche topics have a healthy amount of fresh content. If you fragment users into multiple instances (even if they don't have to worry about creating new user accounts for each one), then it just leads to problems. Eventually they will move towards a single mega-instance, but then you run into the problems above: people won't leave that instance for a new one until they absolutely cannot stand to be there anymore, and some people are going to have lower tolerances for bullshit than others, which means most people are still going to be using the old instance for a very very long time, splitting content between multiple instances. In other words: why go to [email protected] when there's so many more users, and so much more fresh content on https://reddit.com/r/worldnews?

Kind of, but not exactly. I'm asking for a solution where kbin.social and lemmy.world and startrek.website all post to the exact same community, but in a way that doesn't require me to be subject to the whims of the mods of any specific instance.

If a mod on [email protected] (currently the largest Star Trek community instance) were to go on a power trip and ban anybody who mentioned Star Trek: Discovery, I wouldn't want to be part of that community, anymore. Most people wouldn't care, though, and just wouldn't post about Star Trek: Discovery. So, fine, I go subscribe to another instance where they allow Star Trek: Discovery, but if [email protected] has 20 million subscribers, and the next biggest instance only has 40 thousand, the experience of using that next biggest instance is going to suck in comparison. That's the problem I'm trying to find a solution to: a situation whereby a specific instance doesn't control the content for everybody, but instead they only control the content for their specific instance.

How does an instance have "total control" over users from other instances? It has no control at all. At worst it can defederate, which would just hurry along their migration to a new community that's on some other instance.

Look at Reddit: it's gone bad, and yet millions still use the site. So much so, in fact, that content on many subreddits is posted every few minutes, whereas the same communities here on kbin see hours or days between posts. That's what I mean: people are used to the solution they like, so if a community becomes "bad" enough to make me move to a different instance, it might not be bad enough for everyone else, and so I'd be stuck moving to a smaller instance while the majority of users continue using the "bad" instance. Just because I don't need to create a new account doesn't change that fact.

If I don't want to use Reddit, all of the content and users that I benefit from are still over on Reddit. No matter how much I'd like everyone to switch over to kbin, they don't think Reddit is as big of an issue as I do. Clearly. So what am I supposed to do if that happens with [email protected] in a few years? Do I have to put up with a bad site as long as everyone else puts up with it, too? Or do I have to move to a smaller community on a different instance just so I don't have to deal with the problems of the original instance?

I would argue that a community is the content and its users. People don't use a new site/instance unless it's active with content to their quality standards (it's why so many people refuse to use new options that the far-right creates). The only exception is when there are major events like Musk purchasing Twitter to get Mastodon going, or the API changes leading to kbin/lemmy getting more popular. As an example: I'm still using https://reddit.com/r/worldnews because they have the daily update thread on Ukraine, but !worldnews doesn't.

You are very right with the apps, though. Creating a new account is easy, but having to install new apps and set them up is a royal pain. Another pain point is having to learn an entirely new interface, whereas I can spin up my own instance of kbin after using it for a couple of years and feel comfortable with the interface of the new instance, as opposed to going from Twitter to Mastodon which is quite the adjustment.

I don't know about, "this would never work," as it's basically how news forums work today. The news is posted by websites such as CNN.com, Reuters, etc., and then individual forums/websites moderate that content based on their rules. It would be less efficient for small instances to subscribe to big topics, but then there could be a solution about layering moderation (an option to ingest the feed as it gets moderated by a different instance, or to ingest the raw feed, or some other option I didn't think of in the few seconds I gave it thought).

See, I was thinking decentralizing control was the primary goal of federation. Reddit having total control over the content is killer for any other website, so it makes sense for others to want to abolish that grip.

My thinking was like this: a community is made that every instance can join and post to, the posts would be shared across instances like a mailing list, and the community would be moderated on each instance by that instance's community (there would be a mod for [email protected] and a different mod for [email protected]), then each community on their own instances would moderate the content themselves, but it would just be a stream of content flowing into them for each instance to deal with itself. This would allow instances to moderate each community themselves according to their rules, as opposed to each community having rules that stretch across the Fediverse. This way a user would be able to post something to [email protected], and a moderation team for the [email protected] would be able to moderate the content coming from the greater "politics" topic according to their instance's rules and their own community's rules; I imagine users on kbin.social and users on teenagers.wtf to have very different ideas of what's acceptable within their communities. This kind of setup would allow a decentralization of users, content and control.

Obviously I was very wrong as to my assumptions of the Fediverse, and I appreciate the education on the subject matter.

It also could be that people want their instance to be the instance for that community, or they want to be in control of the community, not someone else. It's also one of the concerns I have about user impersonation (having a @timbervale, a @timbervale, and a @timbervale could lead to a whole bunch of confusion).

Oooh, okay. So if I subscribe to [email protected], then kbin would store that data, and I would be able to point everyone to [email protected] and we'd all be able to pick up where we left off? Still an issue of getting users to change where they're posting to, but that's better than I thought, at least.

Also, I imagine the problem with how difficult it is to migrate away from commercial centralized services is that it's hard to spin up a new version of that site with the code and database. Being quick to spin up a new kbin instance or Lemmy instance helps immensely, though the issue of directing the users to those new instances would be just as difficult.