[dotnet00]

This has been my primary concern about federated reddit. With mastodon etc, the defederation stuff is tolerable because you aren't as likely to have any reason to care about the instance defederating from you anyway.

For instance, the free-speech instances weren't going to be interested in dealing with the typical Twitter refugee anyway, and both would be content in their own corner.

But with federated forums this changes, as now you're expecting users from other instances to form a community with your users, so you're heavily incentivised to only work with instances who place the same emphasis on the rules, and unless each "clique" is fine with duplicating all the common forum topics for their own users, the result is that a very small group of people gets to take everyone's content hostage to impose their own will on the community.

So we're back to the same Reddit issue of a few people controlling the majority of the content.