Perhaps an easy way to describe the federation to someone is that, rather than just one reddit with lots of subreddits, it's a bunch of reddits with lots of their own subreddits. You only have to join one of the reddits because from there you can subscribe to any subreddit you want across the whole spectrum the reddits. If you were subscribed to r/gaming before, now you can subscribe to r/gaming@reddit1, r/gaming@reddit2, r/gaming@reddit4, etc (you might want to skip r/gaming@reddit3 cause they're just a bit too authoritarian for you or something). And if your chosen Reddit's moderator ends up being a u/spez about everything and you don't want to support that site anymore, you have the freedom to just skip out to a different reddit without losing access to subs.
/kbin meta
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Unfortunately, this decentralisation of basically what used to be 1 thematic sub into multiple clones "because it's technically possible" is just not what most users are looking for. That is why Reddit was ONE website with such a large amount of knowledge. The human brain likes to centralise stuff in one place. That is why when we put away stuff and clean our own homes, we tend to put all the forks together, all the knives together, all the glasses together... Centralisation is a way to break down complexity of what would otherwise be chaos, by factorizing it.
If you've got 50 different "gaming" instances instead of one, basically the very "gaming" word becomes irrelevant, and users will have to memorise the names of the 50 different hosting instances instead.
Also, on a pure tecnical standpoint, the "federation" aspect is currently simply not true: I get "The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance." warning message when I try to access most magazines that are not hosted on kbin.social.
Also, on a pure tecnical standpoint, the "federation" aspect is currently simply not true: I get "The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance." warning message when I try to access most magazines that are not hosted on kbin.social.
Aside from the currently known issues with the kbin.social server messing federation up for it, my understanding of that message is that it is indeed how the federation between instances works for all magazines/communites/etc. A magazine from another instance doesn't exist here until the first person from here searches for it, at which point just the latest 20 (?) threads are pulled in initially. Once the first person from here subscribes to that magazine then all new threads, comments, etc from that point forward will be pushed here automatically as well. So older threads may not show up hence the message about it being incomplete.
One thing that’s not quite clear to me is whether these individual gaming “subreddits” would effectively work as one to the subscribers or not.
I.e.: YeeAyy, the large game publisher, announces a new hotly anticipated instalment in a popular series, each /r/[email protected] would probably have a post about it. Would I, as a subscriber to each, see X amount of duplicate posts?
Is there any way like-minded communities could voluntarily have all their discussions automatically merged for identical links submitted within a 12-hour range or something?
That way the community isn’t fragmented with lots of very similar discussions occurring in repeated posts in the feed.
Isn’t this the same if you do it on Reddit? I’m already seeing multiple duplicated posts on Reddit
Now it seems the problem is compounded because we're gonna have reposts across different related communities which will then be duplicated onto every instance/server. I'm also wondering how this will affect SEO and long term documenting of the internet. When I do a Google search for something, what will it return?
I'll give it to Reddit, nearly anytime I needed to search on how to do or fix something, those first 2 or 3 Reddit links almost always solved my problem or told me what I needed to know. Not sure how relevant or diverse the returned searches will be with kbin's system.