I used to agree but I don't anymore. The crucial point, and the reason reddit works so much today, is moderation. If anyone can post to a generic programming fo

I used to agree but I don't anymore. The crucial point, and the reason reddit works so much today, is moderation. If anyone can post to a generic programming forum, it will be automatically submerged under spam. There is no way around it. Centralizing the rendezvous point means it is possible to settle on rules and appoint moderators to enforce them. Note, though, that federation as implemented by the fediverse means that I post content on my instance, and you post content to your instance, and both are "tagged" with a central identifier. It is definitely possible to get all content from all instances in one place. There are interesting ways towards decentralized moderation: basically, anyone post anything, moderators "pick" what they deem correct, and you as a user "pick" moderators. When you feel a moderator isn't doing a correct job, you switch the set of moderators. But there still is an element of centralization in that moderators decide what is good and what is bad. And if the history of computing taught us one thing, it's that it is impossibly hard to migrate people away from default settings.