I don’t agree with you that small instances lead to poorer quality, if anything there’s a better sence of community in a small forum.

I’d rather have more in common with old style unfederated forums than big social media.

Who knew Lemmy was so big in Estonia?

According to my memory web rings were a bit earlier than the time-frame I’m talking about, but similar thing.

You’ve just reminded me of something that used to happen around 20 years ago on smaller forums which is “forum affiliates”, where two or more forums with overlapping discussion interests would simply agree to link to each other to drive traffic.

I’m not sure how common that ever was or if it just happened with the types of forums I would visit, but it worked and there’s nothing really similar in the Fediverse. Normally as a rule I tend towards the “stay separate” camp for communities - but something to boost visibility of related communities might at least help with the perceived drawbacks.

I think it’s probably the most important piece of information to have when choosing a server.

While a lot of people have said “it can be used for harassment”, I’ve not seen any information yet on how that could be. On the contrary, I think being open and up-front about federation policies is important for a healthy community - it avoids arguments about going behind people’s backs.

I think it has mostly friendly and mature discussion there. I’d have my account there if they federated more, but that’s my choice as it is theirs.

Actually you’re right and kbin.social works as well, I should have checked.

Excuse me?

Only works with Lemmy instances I think, I’m not sure what the technical reasons are.

How can it be abused and to what end? You can go to any (instanceurl)/instances to see what it’s federated to.

That’s very useful, thank you @Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com

Just to note if copying the URL you have to strip off the https:// or else it won’t work (maybe people just don’t copy that these days, but I ran in to that problem anyway).

Oh, I wouldn’t really count that since it’s contained within one instance. If every time an instance does something unpopular it counts as drama, across thousands of instances there will always be drama.

Out of the loop, what drama?

Is that really an accurate description though? Do people primarily use it to find links, or to have discussions? I think more the latter.

All this defederation drama reminds me of the old 90s/2000s forum days where communities where split into ever smaller groups over rather banal disagreements until you had like dozens of forums with ever smaller userbases and various grades of moderation policies and technical capabilities, often leading to complete data lass after some admins noticed that there’s actual work behind running internet services for lots of users. I worry the Fediverse is headed in a similar direction, though I hope I’m wrong.

You know, it reminds me of that as well but I have an opposite take. The forums I was most active on in the early 2000s were generally ones that had split from larger ones and had became smaller but much stronger and more personal communities as a result. You had the luxury of breaking off precisely because there was no expectation that one community would ever have a monopoly for a topic. Maybe my experience is unique, I don’t know.

I can’t speak for the specific situation here because I don’t know anything about these instances. But the ability for people to split off after a terminal disagreement has generally struck me as a strong point to the voluntary federation we have.