I think it’s healthy for the fediverse to have similar communities on different instances, because if we centralize, it basically becomes reddit, which means moderation and censorship are at the whims of whoever owns the only place people go.

💯

See also this blog post discussing this issue and some of the proposed improvements: https://popcar.bearblog.dev/lemmy-needs-to-fix-its-community-separation-problem/

I like their proposed solution #3, but it is somewhat hampered by the DNS-centric model of ActivityPub. I hope that one day something like this proof-of-concept of making AP content-addresable (which i found via this post about "How decentralized is Bluesky really?") will be widely adopted and make instances less important.

But even without such a major change as moving to content addressability, that blog's proposed solution #3 (simply letting communities "follow" other communities) would let readers pick which moderation they like without posters needing to manually cross post to reach everyone: If communities A and B could mutually follow eachother, posts would by default appear on both but could be independently removed from either. 🤔