[neltnerb]

I mean, I have no huge interest in this battle but if you are on neither you can certainly federate with both.

This is a huge advantage of a large number of smaller servers, defederation as a policy decision by your instance administrator can be solved by moving to a new one without nearly as much trouble if you disagree with it.

The huge disadvantage (or advantage as it evolves) is that [e-mail] and [e-mail] (made up instances) have different membership and moderation.

It will be interesting to see how that goes, I expect niche topics to end up accumulating on one or two servers to gain enough membership while huge topics end up with more serious siloing by instance.

[Semaphor]

> if you are on neither you can certainly federate with both.

Yeah, forgot to mention that not exactly unimportant part, I’m on neither myself and can use them just fine -.- edited it in.

Regarding duplicate communities, I think one of the most important features needed will be something like multi-subs as reddit had it. Right now, I can’t just read all my technology subs without opening them one by one. This will only get worse if more servers defederate from each other.

[neltnerb]

If servers stay at a size that they can be handled by volunteer staff, I don't think you'll see defederation as any kind of normal thing to do. I think the worry is overblown.

Same as any other service, if you're willing to follow the rules of the stricter instance you can interact with it. If your instance won't abide by the stricter rules, so it goes.

I will be curious to see how it goes indeed. I hope the trend is a system of smaller instances with defederation fairly rare and with a tool that lets you at least manually interleave posts in magazines on different instances that you think should be in a single group. But this whole thing is not very old and I imagine in a year it will be very different.

I can't really think of any way to merge comment threads if multiple instances somehow shared a magazine despite having different mods. Can you imagine if half the comments in a thread vanished because a server shut down? I'm not sure that's even conceptually doable.

[Semaphor]

> I can't really think of any way to merge comment threads if multiple instances somehow shared a magazine despite having different mods. Can you imagine if half the comments in a thread vanished because a server shut down? I'm not sure that's even conceptually doable.

Not true merging, just a view to have multiple communities in one place. Maybe even with some extra interaction, like automatic crossposting & links to crossposted threads, but that’s future talk and nothing I put thought in. For now, I’d be happy with just being able to create multi’s exactly like on reddit.