It’s a bit like the United States. Everyone is made to be a stakeholder in each other. However, not everyone is trying to make things move in the same direction. So some stakeholders will be naturally opposed - and the wider the network, the more this effect scales. It is a network effect that naturally limits the size of communities, and it is pervasive on popular social media.
Now we may look at a situation and agree one party is ‘right’ in their desire to reach on the far side of the network and implement a change. That’s quite likely to occur - in small networks and large. The downside is that after a certain size, good actors cannot implement change and actors who only need to disrupt organization and cohesion will rule.
What I would expect to see evolve, is that one primary federated network will rule until lemmy as a whole hits a critical mass. At which point, fractures will occur and smaller discrete federations will share popularity. In the short term there is a risk that unfavorable groups capture the orthodox federation. After the mitosis, multiple ideologies would maintain visible platforms. Eventually the largest federation may come to dominate.
I would also expect that, being a reasonable and honest user, one would see various ‘good times’ and ‘bad times’ over the course of that timeline as power swung like a pendulum. The best countermeasure to bad times, I think, would be to minimize the feedback mechanics that could lead to a single network developing an abusable amount of power. Federation is invaluable for community extension and defederation is invaluable for protecting users from unwanted content. However, I don’t believe it is desirable for federation to be related to authority/legitimacy/power or anything that could lead to exploitable imbalances among federations. Domination of the codebase, of the public eye, of conversation - these things are undesirable to enable within the federation system, to the extent that it can be managed. So long as that is prevented federation should operate beneficially, as intended.
It’s a bit like the United States. Everyone is made to be a stakeholder in each other. However, not everyone is trying to make things move in the same direction. So some stakeholders will be naturally opposed - and the wider the network, the more this effect scales. It is a network effect that naturally limits the size of communities, and it is pervasive on popular social media.
Now we may look at a situation and agree one party is ‘right’ in their desire to reach on the far side of the network and implement a change. That’s quite likely to occur - in small networks and large. The downside is that after a certain size, good actors cannot implement change and actors who only need to disrupt organization and cohesion will rule.
What I would expect to see evolve, is that one primary federated network will rule until lemmy as a whole hits a critical mass. At which point, fractures will occur and smaller discrete federations will share popularity. In the short term there is a risk that unfavorable groups capture the orthodox federation. After the mitosis, multiple ideologies would maintain visible platforms. Eventually the largest federation may come to dominate.
I would also expect that, being a reasonable and honest user, one would see various ‘good times’ and ‘bad times’ over the course of that timeline as power swung like a pendulum. The best countermeasure to bad times, I think, would be to minimize the feedback mechanics that could lead to a single network developing an abusable amount of power. Federation is invaluable for community extension and defederation is invaluable for protecting users from unwanted content. However, I don’t believe it is desirable for federation to be related to authority/legitimacy/power or anything that could lead to exploitable imbalances among federations. Domination of the codebase, of the public eye, of conversation - these things are undesirable to enable within the federation system, to the extent that it can be managed. So long as that is prevented federation should operate beneficially, as intended.