I’m a reddit refugee trying to figure this out. It seems to me like it’s a decent idea to break up countrol like this, but unfortunately there are some inherent problems that mean it might not work in the real world.
The biggest in my view is that communities are scoped to the instance they started in. You could have 2 different communities with the same niche and the same or similar name but different insurances and the subscriber numbers will be split across them. I think this is damaging to growth because it spreads active users.
Eventually if the niche grows one of the communities of the niche will be the biggest and most active. So generally users will consolidate around the instances with the most active communities thus making those instances have a lot of control and defeating the purpose of federation.
Is there something I’m missing here? Because currently I’m not convinced this can both grow and keep things decentralized.
I just want to add here that users can adopt abandoned communities to give them a second chance. So if, in your example, the mods of [email protected] would rage quit and just squat on the name out of spite / indifference, then someone interested in cleaning up the mess can go to [email protected] and request to adopt the community. The admins can then decide to either directly transfer mod rights to the new user, or purge the community so another one can reopen it again, so there is technically no need to create additional communities in such a case.
In case of a direct transfer, no posts or comments get deleted either, so you won’t lose content that you would otherwise have to repost or crosspost to the “new default community”. ;)
On my home instance there was a call for mods for take over communities that had been created and apparently abandoned, both with and without content. “If no one steps up, we’ll just delete the ones without content and make the names available again for the future.”
In practice, it’s not much of a problem.