This one is easy, because regular forums are even more fragmented. Are you really one of those “all or nothing” people?

Defederation would be more akin to a country cutting ties with another in international relationships, when this other country keeps causing trouble, or when making concessions for its problems makes the problems spill over or the bureaucratic cost to become too high. There's still, in this analogy, another 200-ish countries to have relationships with.

In the oxygenating analogy, instead of just one waterwheel, oxygen-blowing tube, small waterfall, or the sort, it's multiple ones. And if one source starts pumping CO2, motor oil, sucking up liquid instead of giving oxygen/oxygenated air to the aquarium, or whatever, this source can be cut without stopping the oxygenating.

And the nature of the protocol and the services that use it also allow people to come over from elsewhere. What I meant, far from "creating users", is to open venues which people can find the platforms of the network, and for the people already in the network to have access to places otherwise barren, and that by interacting with, they can bump into relevance.

On linking externally, from my experience, it's not uncommon for example in places like Pixiv for creators to link their socials, fediverse ones like Mastodon and Misskey included. You can also connect to other protocols such as Bluesky through bridges. Commercial projects such as Threads and Wordpress also have optional ActivityPub integration which would allow more people to join in or at least be aware of. And the services using the protocol are also niche-based but rarely alienating their userbases regarding other places in the network.

And on bigger forums having a larger audience, they usually do so by being so big they cannibalize competition (even if potentially not intentionally) while keeping their userbases in a walled garden. But when alternatives die out, and what's left enshittify, people have nowhere to run. But when Reddit started going from bad to worse, a lot of people found here as an alternative. Similarly, Twitter's at least kinda shitty since always, and very few altenatives stuck around, Mastodon being one of them.

And from what I can notice, the centralizing platforms, even the bigger ones, are either shrinking (e.g. Reddit), already shrunk (e.g. Facebook), or show indications that they may be shrinking (e.g. Discord allowing search engine indexing, and Meta allowing to sign up on Threads with their other services). And places that stay strong despite being centralizing usually offer more than just the forum experience or adjacents.

But once more, unless I've missed it, defederation is very sporadic. And when used, it is usually done so to keep the instance healthy within their culture.

Buddy…

Because people expect a seamless experience?

You want a seamless experience…

And I already told you what to do for that:

Go there, none of us care

If that’s what anyone here wanted, they wouldn’t be here…

Why does one place not being how you want it, mean that it should change to be like everywhere else? And especially when you seemingly don’t want to go to any of the many options that are already like that?

Do you legitimately not understand the responses this is getting?

If you don’t like it, go back to reddit. But you’re not going to convince anyone on the fediverse that the fediverse should be more like reddit. The few people that would agree with you, have already made these same posts, gotten the same responses, and went back to reddit.

How are you surprised the people who stay here like it?

Then why are you on .world? There are plenty of instances that are widely federated.

I judge for myself plenty, but I’ve also been on the internet long enough to know I don’t owe everyone my ears/eyes. I know how to find the information/communities I want to find - I’d rather seek out what I want to see than sift through that which I do not want to see.

I have a look at Tildes from time to time, it’s definitely less active than here. Same for discuit.org which has been stable at 200 weekly active users for quite a while.

In the current world where most of the forum discussion happen on Reddit, there is little space left for another active centralized forum.

The decentralized approach has at least the pro to offer something different (you can leave for another instance instead of depending on a single corporation for access).

Creating another centralize Reddit brings exactly the same issues current Reddit has (enshittification), and you don’t even have the userbase to make up for it. Digg 2.0 launch was messed up, but even if they managed better it would be very difficult for them to get enough traction to really compete.

Bluesky is better that Twitter in a lot of aspect, but it stills fails to replace it, and the network effect keep bringing people back to Twitter to see “what is happening”.

Vicinus replied in the other comment for numbers.

Looks like the Threadiverse is ~45k. So, relatively stable and up year-over-year. Peak would have been 2023-07-17 at 76585 MAU (Lemmy + Mbin/Kbin; during the Reddit 3rd party exodus?).

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn don’t follow the Reddit / Threadiverse structure based on communities

That’s unrelated. Correlation doesn’t prove causation. It’s fair to say you haven’t seen a high-quality centralized forum, but that doesn’t mean one can’t exist.

Either way, I’m pointing to a real issue with Lemmy that you seem to have overlooked: what happens when instances defederate over ideological or other differences?

I was following you up to this point, and somewhat agreeing, to a certain extent. You lost me with the name calling.

If you’re gonna make opinionated posts like this, you might want to get a little better at accepting criticism or disagreement

bro what

Because Lemmy is so popular (emoji with rolling eyes and shit).