Unironically, I feel like this is the way to go with the fediverse. It takes the best parts of the old internet’s forums and the best part of the new internet. I hope more communities go this way instead of just being created on lemmy.ml or lemmy.world.
Double-edged sword, you’re right. You’re just changing who you rely on. But I’d rather rely on the people passionate enough to run a PoE forum/instance vs a corporation like Reddit
It also relies on the infrastructure and federation system to work well. I’m hopefully that it will, but there is still a huge amount of work required to improve user experience and moderation tools.