If some random dude comes in and opens a new instance, and then it comes out that this dude willingly associates with white supremacists, is a known creep, and even had a hand in an actual real life genocide, everybody would defederate without a second thought.

But suddenly that dude is Facebook and has a shit ton of money and everybody is just wait and see.

Aside from the online options you’ve been given (which are good), are you a 100% certain that nobody’s playing it in your country?

I assumed the same thing when I first started learning about the game over twenty years ago, and I found out that there was an email list for a group of players in a neighboring country, so I subscribed there and lurked. A few months later somebody else from my country joined and, instead of lurking, she did the smart thing and asked. And sure enough, somebody replied. Turns out there was a group that met weekly in a pub five blocks from my house.

So basically, I wouldn’t totally discount the possibility that there’s other people closer to you than you think.

Because nobody has windows user as a core part of their identity.

The reason is that Meta is an extremely harmful company. They’ve enabled the worst kind of people in their pursuit of “engagement”. It’s no exaggeration to say that Facebook enabled a genocide. So if people are (correctly) quick to block instances where fascists congregate, why would Meta be treated any differently just because they have a ton of users? They enable fascists, they provide them with a platform. And now they want to bring that platform to the Fediverse, which has been a place that has traditionally been anti fascist.

And that’s just assuming they’ll be good citizens and won’t do an embrace, extend, extinguish thing, which we all know they will do whenever they feel secure enough in their position to do it. So rather than waiting until Meta is already integrated and it’s harder to do it, the idea behind all this is to prevent the issue from coming up in the first place.

I don’t even think it’s a difference with Reddit. Reddit also has community duplication. Sure, maybe not as bad, but it’s there. Compare /r/meirl to /r/me_irl. The only difference is that in Fediverse you’ll see the same community name in different instances, but is it really that much more confusing than the meirl case?

There is, yes, a lack of discoverability for communities. Maybe we need a “recommend me a community” community. Like “I’m looking for a Spanish speaking science fiction community”, and people can say “oh, yeah, try this one”.

Other than that, the main advantage Reddit has in this area is that it has had a more or less stable population for a very long time, so which community wins out out of an initial set has already been resolved, while this is younger (yes, it’s been around for a couple of years, but most people here haven’t) and therefore that process is just starting to play out.

Yes, news and worldnews are different things. But the ones I mentioned above are the same thing, different subreddits. Like me_irl and meirl. No reason for there to be two, but there are.

So sure, maybe the Federation thing makes it even more common. But it’s not a new problem, and it mostly self corrects. People gravitate to the bigger community. The smaller community will get some strays asking why there is not much movement here, and somebody will reply because we’re all at this other place and then the next stray sees the message and doesn’t even have to ask.

Lemmy does have some rough edges. The 0 at the front of the version number is supposed to mean that.

But really, some people will buy the crappiest early access game on steam and then complain that a beta version of a service that is actually trying to do something fairly complicated is not perfect for every use case.

The problem with the multiple redundant communities is real, but it’s also real on Reddit. It’s just that Reddit has been around for much longer and there has been time for everyone to reach a consensus on which community is the real one. And even then there’s different ones still. Is it workreform, antiwork, or workabolition you’re looking for? Or for something with less of an ideological debate behind the separation, is it tabletopgamedesign or boardgamedesign?