Usenet was great back in the day. Decentralized and mostly unmoderated, full of trolls but you learned to block them. It still exists but barely.

In case the OP isn't a troll...

Do you know why aquariums need to keep oxygenated? That's because the type of life that is put there usually needs the oxygen dilluted in the water to be able to breath. If oxygen is lacking, what's effectively swamp water starts forming, water where few life forms can thrive.

Multiple forums I've seen become a metaphorical swamp water because there was barely any renewal in userbase, all the while the original userbase grew tired.

Moderation's also a hit or a miss, and when a forum's slowing to a halt, even a good moderation can make things worse.

OP's discourse also makes it seem like defederation is being used rampantly and without care across the fediverse. But from my experience at least, usually it's a last measure act, even when communities are ideological opposites.

When accounting for all defederations between all instances with at least 50 MAU (as of when I last checked in August, at least), the only instances that are defederated with over 5% of other Threadiverse users are lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, fedinsfw.app, forum.guncadindex.social, and lemmy.1095.me, none of which are oriented towards the average user moving over from Reddit anyhow.

Less defederation on average is better, but defederation is not a huge problem as it stands, particularly if you pick an instance known to use it minimally such as lemmy/piefed.zip.

Just look at Lemmy and how many communities defederate from one another because of ideological disagreements

Lol…

Decentralizing isn’t good if you want everyone in the same spot, that is correct…

But why does everyone need crammed together?

Some people just don’t vibe, if no one wants to federate with an instance, they don’t have to.

I’ll never understand why people who grew up with big social media are so hung up up on this idea that one platform has to host everyone.

Like, a shit ton of fractured forums was the norm for decades, long before Facebook, twitter, or insta. Everyone going to the same place is a new thing, and if people are here it’s because they didn’t think it worked out.

You don’t, you think it’s great for insanely wealthy tech ros to control every conversation.

Cool.

Go there, none of us care

The freedom and control I am able to have over what I see vastly outweighs the inconvenience of not having access to all the content always

I personally love the way the .Zip admins handled it, both for Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip. Defederate a very short number of instances (https://lemmy.zip/instances https://piefed.zip/instances?filters=blocked ), hide new joiners unfriendly instances by default for new users onboarding, but still allow people to unhide it.

We’ve also now enabled a similar welcome message and instance block system to what we’re running on Lemmy.zip. This means some of the spicier instances are blocked by default, which users can remove themselves in the user settings.

https://lemmy.zip/post/50200106

That gives enough freedom to power users while still being welcoming for new joiners.

Also, is there any centralized forum that is more active than the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/Pylova/Mbin)?

What are you talking about?

What fragmentation? I have had zero problems like that. Yeah, there is content that I am not directly seeing, but that is some seriously bad-quality content and if I want to fry my brain, I can always go to the home instances of the idiots and see their crud there.

The most important reason why federation is needed is that it’s the only known way to keep a forum non-commercial for good. You try adding advertisements to a Fediverse server, you get an exodus of users to other servers that show precisely the same content. If you try adding a mandatory ID check for a Fediverse server, users will migrate to servers who don’t have that.

Any non-federated social media will get facebookified/twitterified once it becomes seriously popular. You simply cannot sustainably run a forum without federation.