Rottcodd

That was a rhetorical question.

Ah well... I didn't have much hope that it'd work.

That’s literally the point of the federated decentralization, so people can be allowed to make their own decisions...

This is not quite accurate, and it neatly illustrates the problem.

"Allowed," in this context, is incoherent. There can be no "allowed" unless there's some authority empowered to, and mechanisms by which to, allow this or disallow that.

The literal point of decentralization is to move entirely away from institutionalized, hierarchical authority by arranging things so that it can neither be claimed nor exercised in the first place.

And one problem is that people tend to drag their authoritarian habits of thought along with them.

Okay - let's pretend that everyone on this thread agrees that X is what "we" should do.

Then what?

Of course they did. That's the next step in the perpetual war assembly line.

The entire thread and the entire concept underlying it and all the other threads in which people yammer on and on about what "we" should do plainly miss the most crucial part of the fact that the fediverse is decentralized - it's not just that you don't have the power to decide what "we" should do, but that the power to decide what "we" should do does not and can not exist at all.

IMO, many (most?) people quite simply don't think about things. They just have some dogmatic positions they've taken for some reasons, and they regurgitate them as necessary.

And that's a lot of the reason that they so often and so brazenly misinterpret things other people say. They're not actually reading to comprehend - they're reading just to get enough of a feel for it to classify it, so that they'll have some (potentially quite wrong) idea of which bit of rhetoric to trot out in response to it.

Right, but of course if you don't subscribe to it (and nobody else does) then it doesn't.

So, for instance, if you go in through an account on a narrowly specialized instance, you're potentially not going to see a lot of the communities from other instances at all, even on their All, just because nobody's bothered to subscribe to them. And you'll likely see highly specialized communities that fit well with that instance that you might not see anywhere else.

The smaller the instance is, the more likely that is.

I have accounts on a couple of small instances on which I haven't even bothered to subscribe to anything, since their All already matches what I want frim the instsnce.

It's the entire reason I still own an original Xbox.

Right, which on a side note is most of why I have accounts on a number of different instances and regularly switch between them - because each instance is at least subtly different, since they each have different userbases, and thus somewhat different sets of subscribed and thus federated communities.

My vote for best - Secret of Mana

My personal favorite - Jet Set Radio Future

It's less efficient than a centralized forum would be, but efficiency isn't the only or even the highest priority. Decentralization is the explicit point of the fediverse, and to the degree that that requires sacrificing some measure of efficiency, that's just the way it goes.

The goal was to build a system that would be robust and relatively seamless while remaining decentralized. That's more or less what they've done. There's a fair amount of fine tuning and tweaking left to be done, and actively being done, but the basic system is what it is because it best balances all of the goals.

As already noted, on all of them.

The easy way to grasp how it works:

When you, on instance.alpha, view a community on instance.beta, you aren't actually on community@instance.beta. You're actually on an entirely separate copy - community@instance.beta@instance.alpha. That's the community you're reading and posting to and upvoting/downvoting in. Meanwhile, people on other instances are each on their own locally hosted copies of the same community.

The lemmy software (or kbin or mastodon or whatever) then periodically syncs up all the local copies of community@instance.beta, so you all end up looking at (more or less) the same content, even though it's actually a bunch of technically separate communities.