this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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You missed to point. Compare instances to communities.
Instances are not isolated. It doesn't matter much which instance you join because as long as your instance is federated with other instances you can still participate in the communities you want to participate in. If you don't like your instances, you can join a different instance and as long as that other instance is federated the same way you can get get the exact same experience on a different instance. That means instances are decentralized.
Communities are isolated. It matters which community you join because each post and comment is contained within that community. If you join a small community and there's a bigger community elsewhere you won't be able to participate in the bigger community. If you dislike a community and join a different community you can't get the exact same experience because you can't interact with the same posts. All of that means communities are centralized.
The reason we have popular communities in the first place is because communities are centralized. Centralized communities also work against the decentralization as your example also pointed out, because instances can leverage their communities.
This is also what I alluded to my steering wheels analogy. We don't have tools to decentralize communities. We have a steering wheel for each community instead of one wheel for all communities that are essentially the same.