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I think there’s a problem it introduces for users, particularly casual users (which I think we could use a lot more of).
The first problem is discovery. Discovery isn’t something that can be solved server side afaik without adding a unifying layer to act as an indexer, which is kind of feasible but not really in the federated spirit and would need client integration in any case. Discovery could be made better on the client side, but every client I’ve tried so far has no idea how to do results ranking. I’ll search for “politics” and the top result will be from a topic on an instance with zero posts and two subscribers. Some allow users to specify a sort order but miss results present on other clients, and the sort orders are pretty primitive and only allow you to choose one. I’m also honestly unsure how mainstream search engine indexing is supposed to work (eg “Toyota repair reddit”).
The second is content repetition. People (and bots) will frequently post the exact same content to multiple communities and multiple instances. This problem is exacerbated by the lower content rate, which leaves people browsing /all in case someone posted something interesting somewhere. Again, maybe this is something you could do client side with some off the shelf recommendation engine, and I think a great feature would be to have the ability for users to consolidate feeds into a single feed, and even posts (on identical articles, for example) into a single displayed post, such that the conversation could cross multiple instances transparently.
Kbin shows where links have been posted on other federated servers. It's 10/10 for finding what community is actively discussing a post. I even found a few new subs I gave up on being active here.
@Sabata11792 it's great, we can see at a glance exactly where the active discussions are, when the crossposts are etc.
That update seriously reinvigorated my enthusiasm for KBin as a platform. It's really nice to see a story I find interesting, regardless of magazine/community, then see where folks are actually discussing it.
@wjrii me too - and if there's more than one discussion, sometimes they have gone in different directions.
I also like the way it gives me a chance to upvote the original poster, and see communities I didn't know were out there.
And, it helps avoid reposts within the same community, not to mention the phenomenon I saw recently where a post got posted in community A, cross-posted in community B, and then reposted as a cross-post from community B into community A again. :D