I guess, but it also puts a lot of pressure on those small ones to be indistinguishable from the big ones, by having people treating them like they're the same place.

I don't think Lemmy scales the same way that Mastodon does. I don't think this topic-based community forum model translates to federation the same way the individual-based microblogging space does. It's a more complex space, with more layers to manage. It's often mod or admin driven, whereas microblogs are entirely about average user behaviour.

I don't think it replicates Reddit the same way that it replicates Twitter. I think the mental model just doesn't fit the tech.

Like, yeah, letting users make personalized community lists is one thing, and I get the appeal, but it ends up functioning very differently in a space where multiple communities can have the same handle, you know? I can lump 5 different gaming subreddits together into a single stream, and be totally and intuitively aware that they're different. They have different names, and they present differently, with different stylings, when you actually click through to a post. Without those signals, though, empowering users to lump communities together only has benefits to smaller communities if those communities are looking to grow for growth's sake.

Mastodon has done a great disservice to its admins and users by trying to mask the federated nature of the fediverse. By trying to sell 'Mastodon' as a space in and of itself. By trying to make the actual website you're using invisible. I don't think we benefit from that in any way. Indeed, I think it's only the platform developers who benefit, by making their product the only thing people really see. But the individual websites that make up these networks of social networks are entities in and of themselves. They're like neighbourhoods, or towns. They have their own infrastructure, their own residents, their own characters, and their own needs. Treating them as interchangeable or invisible, ultimately, I feel, stymies the actual potential of the space.

Because this isn't Reddit. It doesn't work like Reddit. It can't try to be "Reddit, but ____", because it fails at the first word. The way forward is in recognizing that, and trying to figure out what this new space really is.

And one of the things it is is not one space.