But if all instances connected to a distributed set of content, then an individual instance can go to shit but people will still have the content and users, instead of having to start over with a new community entirely, hoping that everyone jumps to the same instance you jumped to, or else you would have no content to view/interact with.

It's because below a certain threshold the amount of content posted is low. I don't think you can argue that a news sub is worse off for having more people posting news as it happens.

There are plenty of news subreddits. I greatly preferred /r/anime_titties, for example.

r/news has 26.34 million users. r/anime_titties has 0.47 (even you even somehow stumble upon r/anime_titties being a news/politics subreddit, as I didn't even know it existed until just now, and even then I didn't think "news" when I saw the name of it). Those are two drastically different experiences. Do you at least agree on that?

Then don't. I really don't understand what you think is going on here. If there's one community you prefer, stick with that.

I feel like you're not following the train of logic, here... we're discussing what happens when you can't/won't "stick with that".

They are not fragmented. In what way are they fragmented? Everyone can participate in communities on every instance, no matter where they are.

They are fragmented. Just because they can post somewhere doesn't mean they will. It's why [email protected] has 4,870 subscribers, 190 threads, and 3,180 comments, and yet [email protected] only has 810 subscribers, 10 threads, and 17 comments. If having the ability to post in multiple places meant people actually did post in multiple places, then [email protected] would be a whole log more active, wouldn't it?

People don't need to leave that instance.

You're right, but they would need to start posting to whatever community/magazine I'm subscribed to, or else the community/magazine I'm subscribed to wouldn't have any content, and then why would I bother being subscribed to it?

Because Reddit's admins suck? Why else are you here?

If your only reason was because Reddit admins suck, you could have just quit the internet all together, but you came to kbin for a specific reason. You moved away from Reddit because of the admins, but you moved to kbin because of the content. Now imagine if there were no places with any content; you'd have nowhere to move to, and quitting the internet would be a more appealing option than posting in a magazine with 10 threads over 2 weeks.

The benefit would be the content. Imagine you post to a magazine with 300,000 users, with new posts every 5 minutes, and hundreds of comments per article; that kind of an experience would be more desirable than posting to a magazine with 500 people, with new posts every 12 hours, and maaaybe 10 comments on the more popular posts, wouldn't it?

The benefit of every server moderating everything that comes in would be that a post that isn't suitable for one instance could be perfectly fine for another. Imagine the topic of politics: for some people, discussing abortion might be too sensitive, but others might be totally fine with allowing it. We wouldn't want to stifle conversations about that subject, though, so maybe it gets through to the individual instances to handle it as they see fit. This way a user can continue interacting with a large community that's interested in politics, instead of fragmenting that community into half a dozen smaller communities; sure, some posts might be hidden by some instances, and those threads would be less active than thread about more agreeable subjects, but that's still a lot better than every thread being less active, isn't it?

More like:

I don't understand something I am having trouble wrapping my head around, and so I should ask the community that would best be able to answer my question. I'm not going to switch from Reddit to Instagram, because Instagram doesn't fulfill my needs; why should my evaluation of kbin be any different?

If kbin/Fediverse doesn't work for me, that's okay. It's a really well put together platform, and it's an exciting technology. I hope you guys have lots of fun here for many years to come. That said, if it's not a fit for me, why would I continue to use it?

So you're saying that 14 of the 15 "mini forums" shouldn't exist, and everyone should use a single instance, but access it through their instance via the Fediverse (like subscribing to [email protected] on kibin)? If so, wouldn't that mean a consolidation of power for the [email protected] instance, and thus go against what federation is about in the first place? Or am I misunderstanding the whole purpose of decentralized social media? I thought the reason we wanted to use the Fediverse over Reddit was because Reddit had too much control over the content, but if one instance has all the content, doesn't that instance have just as much power as Reddit has now?

Yeah, that's by far the largest one. I'm just using Star Trek as an example, though I'm actually thinking of other communities that are even smaller. Good link, though.

Unfortunately, not. Multi-reddit just lumped everything together, which allows for duplicates. Using my Star Trek analogy: if there was a new episode, and both communities had a thread for discussion, I'd have to go into both threads to talk about the latest episode. What I want is a single thread being posted to one community automatically gets pulled into the other, and comments can be posted on either site but appear on both. That's the way federation should work, but it doesn't currently work like that. That's my frustration. If I wanted to go to multiple communities to have the same conversation multiple times, I'd search for web forums that have existed ever since "Web 2.0" was a thing in the early 2000's. There's a reason people tend not to use those small forums anymore, and favor larger sites like Reddit. Hopefully it's a change that can come to the Fediverse sooner rather than later.

No, that makes perfect sense, it just seems like a real limitation. The reason Reddit got as big as it did was because everyone was on the same platform, and I didn't need to go to 15 different forums just to have to participate in the same conversations 15 different times. I was kind of hoping the Fediverse would be a replacement for that, but instead it seems to dive headlong into the "15 small forums are better than 1 big forum, even though it's been proven time and again that (most) people don't want that".

Oh well. Back to using Reddit, I suppose. Thank you for the answer, though!