Exactly my concern. This is just going to encourage every instance to make its own community for everything, largely just turning everything into their own closed system to avoid getting arbitrarily cut off by admins from other instances for no reason.
The only real workaround for the user is going to be making new accounts for every instance. Which is… very much not ideal.
I remember seeing an older lemmy user talk about it on reddit, but he basically said that for these alternatives to be successful, we have to avoid supporting instances that push other ones away cuz otherwise it heavily cuts the userbase and prevents the entire thing as a whole from growing.
It sucks cuz I understand their prespective, but if instances keep separating from each other, we wont make progress and will just confuse users into thinking they are less communities and people than there actually is.
It also seems instance admins dont have as many tools as they should have. They apparantly cant make it read only for other instances or any sort of partial blocking at all, its either all ban or nothing. Polishing these issues up should help instance admins make less extreme decisions.
If this sort of thing can just happen with no preparation, the federation is clearly not going to work as a replacement for anything propietary. This was the largest Gamenews hub? And now its basically just been killed and left to splinter.
If choices like this truly kill it, there week be fewer communities that make this choice. Federation will win out in the end, it's just still the wild west stage right now.
Creating a walled garden doesn't work in a federated system
Test post from lemmy.world
While you can still post here, nobody from that instance (including mods) will see your post
this post is just a heads up to people using lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
And they (people on sh.itjust.works) don't seem to see this too, see https://sh.itjust.works/... where last post is 9 hours ago.
So, if I understood federation right, this post should only be visible on lemmy.world.
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
See, this is the kind of crap that concerns me with federation. Communities can just disappear overnight and cut off users for any reason.
Time to remove beehaw communities from my sub list.
save