PSA: Alternatives for the most popular lemmy.ml communities
For all your boycotting needs. I'm sure there's some mods caught in lemmy.ml's top 10 that are perfectly upstanding and reasonable people, my condolences for the cross-fire.
I disagree. The decentralization is thought through at an instance level, not community level. If it was thought through at a community level we'd have tools to aggregate different communities. The current solution is the equivalent of having multiple steering wheels on a car, nobody thought how you'd actually steer the car so you were given the option to steer each wheel separately. It might make sense on a superficial level but if you thought about how users actually use the thing you'd know it's not the best way to do things.
People have the ability to block communities as they see fit individually and also follow whatever communities they want and only browse their subscribed list. (steering wheel)
But when popular communities are on an instance that is very much "get on board or get out" to the point they ban users from every community on their instance for having differing political views, it is very much reasonable to try to start or promote communities run on different instances controlled by better admins. (where the roads go (ok, so building roads is a bad analogy, it is more like when a place has terrible sidewalks so people walk through the grass and they wear in those little dirt-path short cuts and eventually no one uses the sidewalks))
You missed to point. Compare instances to communities.
Instances are not isolated. It doesn't matter much which instance you join because as long as your instance is federated with other instances you can still participate in the communities you want to participate in. If you don't like your instances, you can join a different instance and as long as that other instance is federated the same way you can get get the exact same experience on a different instance. That means instances are decentralized.
Communities are isolated. It matters which community you join because each post and comment is contained within that community. If you join a small community and there's a bigger community elsewhere you won't be able to participate in the bigger community. If you dislike a community and join a different community you can't get the exact same experience because you can't interact with the same posts. All of that means communities are centralized.
The reason we have popular communities in the first place is because communities are centralized. Centralized communities also work against the decentralization as your example also pointed out, because instances can leverage their communities.
This is also what I alluded to my steering wheels analogy. We don't have tools to decentralize communities. We have a steering wheel for each community instead of one wheel for all communities that are essentially the same.