User accounts are fragmented and just because you signed on at lemmy.world doesn’t mean your account exists on lemmy.ca.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
Communities are fragmented and /c/games on lemmy.world is completely different than the one on lemmy.ml with its own users, set of posts, etc.
Lemmy does not currently allow for instance or user migration.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3057
Nor does it allow for shared communities (ie the aforementioned /c/games is unified across multiple instances)
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3100
We are in the early days. If you’re eager feel free to join in the development on these any many other core issues. There’s real potential here.
The benefit of federation isn’t that no community becomes dominant for it’s field, it’s that there is no central authority. It’s open source, so if a change is accepted that makes apps pay a ton for API access (random example), a fork can be made to roll back that change and servers can switch to the fork. It also means that if one server goes down, the rest doesn’t go with it, or one wild admin can’t destroy everything.
If one server becomes dominant for one thing and they fuck it up eventually, a new community can be created. This isnt a feature of federation though. The same thing can (and did) happen on Reddit. There are huge benefits to federation, but that isn’t one. Segregation of communities also isn’t one.
Imho a better option, which I’m sure if Lemmy is successful will get there, is a central app but with a public codebase and a federated ownership. A central platform owned by the people for the people.
What does “central app” mean to you? You’re aware the code base is shared right?
That’s literally what this is
Maybe do a bit more reading before you post