this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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A lot of our biggest communities still have like two mods taking care of everything and are prone to cherry picking. It‘s the same old forum structures where the internet bubble effect is just as strong if not stronger than on larger, already problematic platforms. Some of the things I‘ve seen and experienced lately bring back memories from those internet forum days. Good ones but also the worst ones. And I have to admit it makes me doubt the Fediverse is actually scalable. There‘s just a lack of accountability in the end.
Which is not to say a federalized platform isn‘t an alternative to giant corporations. Those have their own problems and fair share of fuck ups. But I think I‘m already starting to see the limits of the Fediverse. At least in it‘s current stage.
Could you elaborate on the scalability problems of the fediverse in comparison to corporation owned platforms?
I fear communities are lacking resources and structure to handle the masses. It‘s something corporations already struggle with but they house like 10000 times more active users. One way to go around that was mentioned above and suggested that new users may keep creating new instances and communities so a few places don‘t just explode in size. But from my experience, if a community already covers a topic, there won‘t be much competition and we end up with a power mod environment (Reddit) at best and instances going dark from overload (hug of death) at worst.
But I don‘t want to sound too bleak about all of this. In the end these are challenges that someone might already work on.