It’s just a lot of thoughts going through my head since federation. I feel like there’s going to be one Reddit clone that will absorb members from all the other would-be clones. Most people will choose the largest Reddit clone by default, which will snowball until there’s only one clone left. Right now, the favored Reddit clone is lemmy.world, but the admins are apparently paranoid about us creating wrecker alts to ruin their shitty instance, so that could be a source of instability. I agree about lemmy.ml. For lemm.me, I’ve noticed a lot of banned users come from that instance and it feels like we get the most pushback from them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually defederate from us, at which point lemmy.world would just completely absorb lemm.me’s users. From the perspective of an incredulous lib who doesn’t understand fascism even when it’s biting them in the ass, the only difference between lemm.me and lemmy.world is one instance federates with Hexbear while the other one doesn’t and once the instance that federates with Hexbear no longer does so, lemm.me just becomes a smaller lemmy.world. I dunno, it’s just a thought I have.

As an aside, here’s an interesting thread in beehaw about whether they should just defederate. I think most people have predicted beehaw would eventually wither away, but I didn’t expect the process to happen this fast. It’s also very interesting how even the libs at beehaw recognize some of the flaws of Reddit (they’ve taken out downvotes like us for largely the same reasons). They at least understand that trying to recreate Reddit when Reddit already exists is a terrible idea. However, being libs, they are hampered by having a terrible intellectual framework. They also have a huge civility fetish such as some loser in that same thread shamelessly admitting they would deal with a transphobe than some angry person.