the “fragmentation” is not the problem with federated services, it’s the benefit. if everyone ends up on a single instance, in a single community, you are back in the same situation as reddit, a single entity in control of the community. sure it will start out better with benevolent overlords or whatever, but what happens when it grows so large the financial burden of supporting it is too large? or the potential financial gain is too hard to ignore? maybe ads first? uh oh, now the advertisers object to some of the content, some mild filtering begins… now we’re in the same gradual spiral into a corporate overlord as all the services before it.
so we don’t need everyone to choose an instance and move there, we need a shift in thinking to move away from the mindset of a single consolidated community being the only way. maybe you subscribe to /X/technology on 5 different servers. that’s ok. now if one of them goes rogue you unsubscribe from it and you still have 4 others.
Sure things are not perfect as they are, I think the UX in it’s current form around how this functions could still use some work etc., but i think it’s a more sustainable model in the long run.
well history shows you are probably correct, but i think that’s the problem. i’m old enough to have been through this cycle many times now. it’s just the reality that it costs money to run single large instances of anything, and that money has to come from somewhere. whoever is paying gets to control the direction of the community. historically that has not been the users and that’s where the problem comes in.
i think allowing some kind of grouping functionality for different communities is a fairly simple UX issue really, which still needs to be solved, but shouldn’t be a huge issue. to me the larger problem is discovery really.