Lemmy claims decentralization, but once you join a community on one instance you’re still subject to that instance’s rules and moderators. Being banned from c/community@instance still means you can’t post there unless you make a new account elsewhere. That isn’t real decentralization, it’s just fragmentation where every instance ends up replicating the same centralized moderation power in a different place. Federated instances don’t stop this, they just scatter the same problem across multiple servers. If the goal is escaping centralized control, the reality is you still get banned, silenced, or cut off the same way, the only “freedom” is signing up somewhere else. That’s not decentralization in practice, it’s decentralization in name only.
You can subscribe to communities on different instances. I click All or Subscribed I see stuff that isn’t just in my instance.
That’s kind of the opposite of fragmentation. Personally, I enjoy seeing which instance each person is from.
well, lemmy itself is pretty niche. Yea I get that it’s frustrating when there’s a niche community with basically zero activity … I feel like that’s just because lemmy itself is relatively small.