Lemmy

I think part of the issue is that all the different Lemmy and kbin instances are trying to be Reddit themselves. By which I mean there are a bunch of instances with no focus. They're all "kitchen sink" instances, each with their own Politics, Tech, Cats, etc.

Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin.social, fedia.io. All of them are generic reddit alternatives, but the real reddit alternative is the amalgamation of subscriptions from multiple more focused instances.

Startrek.website is a great example of the opposite: it's an instance focused on one topic, where some people will want to sign up as a user and others will want to just subscribe to one of their three (!) boards from their own instance. They don't need their own Politics topic, users on the site that care about it will subscribe to a politics topic from another instance. The startrek admins and mods only have to care about their one focus.

My ideal fediverse feed would be pulling individual topics from a few dozen more focused instances instead of one generalist instance. I think that's what's going to end up happening.

When using email, be aware that george@aol.com is the real George. All other Georges on all other email servers are fake.

This is not a communication problem. Communities are indeed centralized and if an instance is shut down permanently or loses its data all the communities are gone. This is a big design problem of Lemmy.

Edit: it's sometimes possible to rebuild new communities on another instance and recover past messages that have been replicated on other instances (if there were full replicas) but this requires all users and moderators to agree on where to migrate and avoid splits and so on.