That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.
The phrasing here kinda implies this is a bad thing and everyone should be focused on 🚀 constant growth 🚀.
Tildes in particular has an extreme focus on quality over quantity and has some really interesting ideas on moderation (that haven’t been implemented due to lack of time on Deimos’ part). The site is still considered an alpha after all this time.
Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.
A thing to look out for is that the microblog fedi (outside the big handful of instances that fill .world’s role there) is strongly in favor of stricter instance-level moderation compared to the more “individualistic” view a lot of the Reddit migratees tend to have. If we want people from the microblog fedi to participate we (collectively) need to up our moderation game. (And in my personal opinion instances like .world have grown too large to accomodate any reasonable expectation of moderation, except for select individual communities set up there)
If you are explicitly aware that different instances specialize in different concerns I can absolutely see the use for a feature like that, but most people want a feature of that sort just so they can “paper over” federation and pretend to have one giant community with one giant moderation policy / culture / priorities.
And that is before getting to the absolutely horrible idea of automatically generating multi-communities by merging communities with the exact same name regardless of their instance.
It’s really nice that the Local feed exists, but when people just bulk subscribe to 8 different communities with the same name, stick to their subscription list, and then treat them all as the same place, that just kills a lot of potential for heterogeneity.
That’s what people are used to from Reddit. They’re used to having one giant subreddit about one topic. That’s why everyone’s centralized themselves on lemmy.world or kbin.social. That’s why one of the most requested features is the ability to make “multireddits” (or otherwise combining all different communities into one)
This is a culture problem to solve, technical solutions can only do so much to help.
Lemmy does not implement AF but AF is not a requirement on Firefish (admins can choose to enable or disable it, unlike say GoToSocial which forces it on)
That said, this is still a massive flaw in Lemmy and not having AF enabled on the non-Lemmy side makes defederation essentially useless (which is bad considering the kinds of places that have already set up shop on those parts of fedi), so I personally don’t think the trade off of “federating with Lemmy” is worth it.
The admin of this instance has said basically everything I would stumble over my words trying to respond to you, in way better words than I could, in this very thread: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2186548
Isn’t mastodon basically centralized under mastodon.social? I’m not participating in microblogging part of fedi so I genuinely don’t know the situation there, but the statics on fedidb.org shows that mastodon.social has almost 4 times more users than the second largest server.
On Mastodon there are quite a bit of smaller instances that silence (basically opt-in federation per follow, one step before full defederation) .social/.online/universeodon and similar large instances. With the centralization we have wrt lemmy.world you cannot do something of that scale without significantly hurting your view of the threadiverse (and there are instances, most famously Beehaw, who have found that an acceptable compromise)
The community/group aspect of Lemmy also amplifies this centralization even more compared to Mastodon which does not have that functionality (without external bridges such as a.gup.pe) (yet).
https://git.arielaw.ar/arisunz/ir34/