I’ve recently tried to use peertube and I think it could improve a lot if it showed all the content in all instances. But instead you have to look around many instances to try and find something you like. Then there’s other thing, it can’t suggest content if it doesn’t know what you like and without sharing the data between the instances it doesn’t know anything about anyone. If the user data was encrypted and shared between all sites, when you log in it could use the now decrypted user data to suggest content. Or maybe it can share the data with third parties, I don’t really know.
An advantage of federating is to accommodate servers with a variety of objectives, and maximizing content isn’t always the primary objective. Sometimes it’s to cultivate a good community that uses the tools in on the platform but not necessarily to have the widest reach of content, because creating places that moderate harassment and antagonization is sometimes the higher priority. Sometimes that, and not maximized access to content, is what draws people in. The major influxes of users to Mastodon at it’s start joined for exactly this reason.
I think the concern regarding centralization was always with respect to the network as a whole - all of Twitter is just on Twitter, all of Facebook is just on Facebook, neither are spread across servers. Having multiple servers that exist for their own purpose serves to support decentralization, and having one server that has all the stuff you want that doesn’t connect with other servers is not realistically going to create another Facebook situation in terms of centralization, at least not at any point in the near future. The closest we have to that right now is Mastodon.social having the lions share of Mastodon users (in the English speaking world that is), and federating with mastodon.social leads to effectively leads to being a clone of Madison.social. That isn’t necessarily bad, but some communities have the goal of cultivating unique voices and letting specific kinds of content rise to the top, and that all washes out to an average, lowest common denominator if they federate with the biggest servers. Rather than centralizing, it serves to create a diversity of unique offerings.
I’m also generally wary of arguments that everything needs to be connected because trolls frequently make that argument, hoping to pry open the platform for more harassment, and by design the fediverse is structured to be resilient against that. So it’s good to get people explicitly on the record about whether they think trolling is a problem, whether “free speech” on the internet is more important than moderation, and what they think the implications of their suggestion are on that issue, because it’s at the heart of federation, and sometimes these conversations are really just about creating a backdoor for trolling and normizaling policies that make trolling easy.
Yeah, there will be instances that people run that have bigoted and harassful content and the like, and there are people who don’t want to see any of that and want to be on an instance that blocks that, that’s fine. But I don’t see a good reason why any two unproblematic instances should be disconnected.
I see your point about some instances wanting to cultivate their own ecosystem and not blend in to one monotony. But to keep things disconnected is like giving a lung transplant to someone with a cough. It’s an extreme solution to the problem that could be solved in other ways with fewer negative consequences.
That’s why local exists if you just want to view content from your home server. That’s why communities exist on lemmy. And there are easily other solutions that could be created. You could have different algorithms for filtering content. To block content from other instances for this issue is overkill. And it’s unfair to users. Will users be warned before joining an instance that they are not being provided a window into the fediverse but instead a segregated platform?
People have grown accustomed to having full and convenient access to everything. That’s why everyone joined the big platforms in the first place. You don’t want 12 different accounts to interact with your friends on various platforms. You want to keep it simple and powerful. And it’s confusing and annoying for new people when they see content linked somewhere else but they can’t find it from their own instance. I ran into this many times when I was new to the fediverse.
Of course every instance manager has a right to run theirs the way they see fit, if they really want to do it differently or not federate at all that is their right. But I think with a lot of instance managers it is not intentional. Managing their instance is maybe not the most important thing in their life, more of a hobby. So just like not all instances on lemmy.ml’s list always update to the latest version right away, they may not pay attention to the minutia of other small instances out there. And clearly they are not concerned with the problems you mentioned, otherwise they would not federate with lemmy.ml. So I think the solution is to give tools to make it easier for them to federate with lots of other servers, maybe automatically, for those who want it.