This is just a reiteration of a comment I left on an earlier, probably more useful article, but I’m posting as its own article for visibility. I hope it can help make sense of the fediverse to at least a few more of my fellow migrants.
Basically, rather than having one Reddit with a bunch of subreddits, you have a bunch of Reddits each with their own set of subreddits. Each Reddit operates with its own admin, features, UX, etc. so you just join any Reddit that feels good to you.
Let’s say you make your account on “Reddit.one” because not only do they have killer memes, they also have a dark mode!
What makes the fediverse so great is that you don’t have to worry that “Reddit.two” actually has a far more active r/gaming community than Reddit.one, or that “Reddit.three” has the only r/catsatwork subreddit on the fediverse, because you can actually just subscribe to those subreddits from Reddit.one anyway. Now you can have r/memes as well as r/gaming@reddit.two and r/catsatwork@reddit.three all in your feed at Reddit.one with dark mode on!
Some reddits even let you follow your favorite twitter personalities as well!
It would be like being able subscribe directly to 4chan’s /b/ and then follow elon musk’s Twitter account directly from Reddit and vice versa. I don’t know why you would actually want to do those terrible things, but you’d have the freedom to do it at least.
Now imagine if Reddit.one’s administrator goes all u/spez on everybody and you just can’t even anymore. You can easily jump ship over to Reddit.two, or any other Reddit you prefer, and resub to all your favorite subreddits again. it would be like you never left.
Hope this helps. Feel free to set me straight on some points or just post your own explanation in the comments.
TLDR: Lots of different Reddits. You join the Reddit you like, but you can subscribe to any of the other Reddits’ subreddits as well!
Not sure what you mean. Sure you can buy any domain and put it behind. But ultimately you are much easier to doxx. Between whois, server IP etc. Then there is the issue of the security on that server too, but that's another story. What would be better is to have a way to put this behind TOR/I2p, that would make things a bit better.
On a centralized website the issue is less present as only the admins of the server can see the details about you, ip etc (maybe mods can too on reddit, not sure), here everyone can see everything, it's a lot more invasive imho. Everytime you upvote/downvote something, your account handle is saved on the post as upvoter/downvoter. This is very juicy data to build profiles and analytics on people.