If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
I’m pretty much brand new to lemmy but the thought of having to switch instances to see cooking conversations after conversing about Raspberry Pi projects in a different instance just seems unwieldy. But I guess as long as my instances are all federating with each other I don’t need to switch instances. I’m a technical guy but this needs to be easier for joe sixpack or it’s not going to catch on. And if it doesn’t catch on there’s going to be less interesting content…
Correct, as long as the instance your account is in federated with all other instances you’re subscribed to, you don’t have to switch accounts.
Now, defederation is another issue if you want to see the widest possible amount of content. What’s going to happen is ideologically opposed instances are going to defederate each other, so left-wing instances are going to defederate right-wing ones and vice versa. So if you’re a user who wants to see the content from both sides, you’ll have to create multiple accounts in each “cluster” of federated instances. It’s kind of annoying to be honest, it makes it hard to discover communities just because your instance admin decided to defederate from them and encourages echo chambers, but it it’s the best we’ve got.