this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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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.
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.