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So far, yes, but I don't really have any allegiances to this site and will jump ship to a competitor in a heartbeat if something better comes along. I know some people like the decentralized federation approach here, but I actually see that as the biggest downside to using this site. The value proposition of Reddit in its heyday was that it offered a single landing point for all sorts of discussions that used to be scattered across hundreds of different forums. The decentralized federation approach moves away from that, and while that offers some advantages, it also comes with a lot of disadvantages too.
I don't think the fediverse paradigm moves away from that, on the contrary. We still have a single landing point, our home instance. Except now it even pulls content from 3rd party servers all over the internet. If you were interested in reddit, hacker news and tildes, you'd have to check out each one separately, and use a separate app for each one. With lemmy, kbin, mastodon, pixelfed, etc, you can use one app and one account to follow all of them. We just have to work a lot on the UX of in-app discoverability, which really has a looong way to go.
Defederation works against that though. When I first joined a few weeks ago, a lot of the discussion was taking place on Beehaw. I joined a few communities over there and started to enjoy the experience but in an instant, all of that was blocked because Beehaw decided to defederate from Lemmy.World (and others). That sort of thing will happen more and more in the future. I don't want to have to create a dozen different accounts on a dozen different instances to view the content I want to see: I want a simple interface with everything in one spot.
Reddit offers the "everything in one spot" piece, but they killed the simple interface possible via apps like RIF and replaced it with an abysmal official app.
Lemmy offers the "simple interface" piece with apps like Jerboa, but the federation aspect of it makes it hard to get everything in one spot.
The second a competitor offers both features with a large enough community to allow for meaningful discussion, I'd be happy to make the switch.
That's true. I mean, you have to consider beehaw is a bit unusual, most instances federate with all other non-extremist ones. The typical experience with Lemmy is being able to go to one spot, your instance, and pull content from all over. But yeah, defederation is always a risk the design allows for. The best we can do as users is try and pick an instance that seems unlikely to do that.