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> What is the practical effect on the user of an instance being "defederated?" The entire instance is sort of "shadow banned". Everyone on it can post, but no

> What is the practical effect on the user of an instance being "defederated?" The entire instance is sort of "shadow banned". Everyone on it can post, but no one will ever read it (except for the few dozen people on that instance). Since forums have some minimum number of users/readers that if the number falls below this people just give up and go away, it will be dead within a month. Not only is it like being shadow-banned, but you get to be shadow-banned for what the other people on the instance are posting. The Fediverse might be a good model for a Twitter-alike (it's debatable), but I don't think it's a good model at all for a reddit-alike. Conversations aren't meant to always be civil. If you enforce that harshly, it turns into a place to post cat pictures.

SoftTalker 3y ago
So the likely fallout of that would seem to me be that if a "federated Reddit" ever got off the ground: - Over time, a few instances will grow to dominate and nobody will defederate them because they are too big and you'd lose too much/make too many people mad. These will be the Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail, etc. instances. - As they become larger, instances will be motivated to follow established politics of the big instances so they don't get cut off. - Small instances will exist as echo chambers for certain unpopular points of view and mostly none of the big instances will federate them. Porn, Nazis, KKK, Anarchists, religious extremists, etc. - Possible large bifurcations may develop, e.g. "Fox News/Breitbart" vs. "CNN/Huffington"; each has large followings but they would probably not federate each other. - New users who just want a place to do normal Reddit-like stuff will be confused by all of this.