Kabaka

This should help.

With the utmost sincerity, I recommend deleting this and erasing all known copies.

I don’t think the problem is limited to “morons.” I understand this system and have operated federated services in the past, but it is a lot more work just to navigate this when compared to something like Reddit. I don’t have a ton of free time, and I’d rather spend that time engaging with the community vs wrestling with the service or trying to find which instance has the most activity. I know this will get better as it grows, but a lot of people will just get fed up and go somewhere they can just socialize.

There are many instances (“servers”) of the service running, and each one can have its own, local equivalent of a subreddit. We can see and interact with all of them. I just went through 15 pages of “magazines” and subscribed to communities with the same name on 2+ instances at least a dozen times.

Suppose I am interested in photography, so I subscribe to the photography community on instance “foo.” Another user has the same interest, but they find the community on instance “bar” and subscribe to that. If I post on photography@foo, they won’t see it. The community is effectively split — often into more than two parts.

This makes it really difficult to build an engaging community at a scale similar to Reddit’s. Ideally, users will eventually congregate around just a few, but this is going to make early growth quite painful. And it isn’t intuitive to newcomers.