[howlgarnish]

Is this meaningfully different from the user's point of view than just subscribing to a set of different subreddits? What does the user or the host get out of using federated servers?

From my POV this seems to be the same issue that has prevented federated social networks or chat services from taking off: there's no meaningful, concrete advantage to it.

[mariusor]

I'm the developer behind littr.me. In my mind, the best reasons for migrating to your own service as a reddit community is the fact that you get ownership of it. You can monetize, you can enforce rules that are different to reddit's, you can focus your interface more specifically towards custom UI, etc.

The main downside of moving off reddit would be that you lose access to the larger pool of reddit users and communities. That however is mitigated by the fact that federated communities can still interact with each other despite being independent services.

Personally this would be my main goal for the project: managing to get one of the cool subreddits to leave reddit in favour of starting their own independent community using my code. However some of the things that are made easier by the centralized model of reddit are quite more difficult in the federated case (moderation as an example), and I don't feel confident (yet) to push for this.

[betwixthewires]

Consider as a part of user experience the ability to select your own admin and mod teams and terms of service by choosing a server on which to participate, or even be your own admin and mod team by launching your own server, without having to sacrifice access to a larger userbase. This changes the user experience considerably and is a definite draw.