Doesn't it feel completely different to participate in a local community vs a federated community? Its so interesting how that works even if everyone can see everything everywhere.

What’s even cooler here is I feel we have the opportunity to have neighboring villages: I’m a villager in my instance, you’re a villager in your instance, and civility and understanding is promoted because we are in a real sense representatives of our respective villages. We don’t want to make our villages look bad.

Such a nice point! You gave me something to think about now :) In a way, while you are still anonymous, the instance gives you an outside identity. You don't have to remember the username to "know someone from the village" in a way the author describes it, the instance kinda already gives you this.

Especially since "villages" can completely block an entire other "village".

Keeps communities that don't want to be isolated more reasonable without having hardline rules

Well met, fellow villager named… uh… Barbarian

How is community engagement better in a interconnected forum compared to a single forum consisting of all the participants? I'm asking out of ignorance

How would cross community discussions take place?

I agree. The problem is that many people who come to Lemmy don't know how it works, and they gravitate to the biggest instances automatically. Heck, it's what I did when I joined Beehaw. It wasn't until a few days later that I understood the pro's of this method. Fortunately, the Beehaw community rules really aligned with me, so I was lucky in that way.

I can see pros and cons. More people all at once gives greater odds of some unique perspective to take hold that would otherwise only be seen in a single smaller sub community. But there’s also a more vested interest in the health of “your” community if it’s smaller.

Baseball is a fun example because I’m really sad the biggest group so far has only like 80 subscribers. I NEEEEEED my fix of baseball chatter so I really want that one to grow, lol.

I think more content is a double edged sword though. I find I used Reddit to second guess myself a ton, like which thing to buy, whether I should like something, etc.

In a smaller community, I'm left to think more for myself since I can't just offload that to the group.

Sometimes that data is really useful, but I think I've gotten too dependent. So a SM diet was absolutely in order. And as you said, I'm very much enjoying it. We'll see what happens in the next few weeks as the Reddit situation resolves one way or another.

I don't think we need the police comparison...

Some moderation is necessary, but if things get out of hand your instance will just be defederated. So it is more self regulating than you suggest.

Absolutely, but if the values are spread across the whole community, the village can self-govern itself and enforce the rules without force. If the majority of the villagers don't tolerate something makes the job of a police much easier.

I hear a lot of people talk about how Reddit was full of terrible people. I very rarely saw these people though. Not sure if their voices got down-voted, or maybe I simply stayed away from the communities they gravitated to. Personally I never really browsed Reddit home screen, I just bookmarked the communities I liked and went directly to their pages. So maybe that's how I missed out on a lot of it.

That said, I did se quite a bit of nonsense when browsing gaming forums. PC gamers hating console gamers, xbox gamers mocking ps gamers and vice-versa. Never did understand peoples need to be superior in the gaming world. These are all just methods of enjoying the same hobby!

Wow, that was a great read!