I think part of the issue is that all the different Lemmy and kbin instances are trying to be Reddit themselves. By which I mean there are a bunch of instances with no focus. They're all "kitchen sink" instances, each with their own Politics, Tech, Cats, etc.

Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin.social, fedia.io. All of them are generic reddit alternatives, but the real reddit alternative is the amalgamation of subscriptions from multiple more focused instances.

Startrek.website is a great example of the opposite: it's an instance focused on one topic, where some people will want to sign up as a user and others will want to just subscribe to one of their three (!) boards from their own instance. They don't need their own Politics topic, users on the site that care about it will subscribe to a politics topic from another instance. The startrek admins and mods only have to care about their one focus.

My ideal fediverse feed would be pulling individual topics from a few dozen more focused instances instead of one generalist instance. I think that's what's going to end up happening.

When using email, be aware that george@aol.com is the real George. All other Georges on all other email servers are fake.

I feel like this is how it will realistically happen though. People will flock to one instance and use that one community, otherwise it becomes too stagnated.

The best thing about federation is that if that hugely popular community's instance were to crash/go down, the community can just join another one. Sure it might take some coordination, but why not have one central place to hang out until it gets shitty?

Imagine youre at your favorite bar. They get new owners and then all their prices change. But hey guess what, you can make an exact copy of the same bar on a different instance! "Hey guys, lets all go to this new bar thats literally the same thing across the street!" and then everybody is happy.

While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it's clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they're usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

I'm not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to "bob@microsoft.com and bob@apple.com are different people" because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn't take that long to click honestly.

Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don't turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn't seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what's going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I'm sure...!

Tell them to browse "All" and enlighten them.

This is not a communication problem. Communities are indeed centralized and if an instance is shut down permanently or loses its data all the communities are gone. This is a big design problem of Lemmy.

Edit: it's sometimes possible to rebuild new communities on another instance and recover past messages that have been replicated on other instances (if there were full replicas) but this requires all users and moderators to agree on where to migrate and avoid splits and so on.

OP, could you please link the archive too? The community is set up to NSFW so you can't access it without account, and let us not create accounts in that shithole again.

Here's an archive link for the full thread, as OP here is focusing on one comment.

Anyway: yes, there is a communication problem. I think that the "the whole" and the flagship instances should be called by different names; I've been using "the Lemmyverse" (subset of the Fediverse) and "lemmy.ml flagship instance" (subset of the Lemmyverse) respectively, but that is far from ideal. And what happens is that you invite people to the Lemmyverse and they end in lemmy.ml. Mastodon has a similar problem, by the way.

Specifically on r/stallmanwasright: I used to participate a fair bit in that [rather small] sub, so I'm happy to see them coming to the Lemmyverse. And I feel like it actually fits well within the flagship instance, as it's focused on FOSS enthusiasts. I hope to see u/sigbhu (the head mod there) around - I might not like his approach as moderator*, but in general he's fairly sensible as a person, and his opinions are often worth listening to.

*he tends to confuse too much his personal views with community views.

That's not how I read it. They were saying it didn't matter because of federation you can sub to any of them wherever they are.

This will sort itself out as people get used to and understand the fediverse better. I think not having a good cross instance search for communities is part of the contributing factor to this confusion. At least it was for me.