All of this seems unnecessarily confusing, and massively confusing at that. Why would anyone want to join a different instance? If I comment on one instance, then can I log into a different instance with the same credentials and edit my comment? Why would I want to do that? If I moderate a sub on one instance, then am I still a moderator of that same sub on every other instance? Why don’t we all just use one instance? The entire design of this system seems intended to confuse people.

There’s a certain syndrome — I bet it has a name, but I’ve never heard it named — where extremely smart people find it easy to grasp complicated ideas, yet fail to understand that those ideas which they grasp are far too complicated for normal people.

Personally, I know how distributed systems work, and if that’s how you want to design your backend for resilience, cool. But such complexity should never be exposed to users. And as a user, I’m here just to finally escape reddit’s governance. I want a dead-simple UX, because that’s what will attract people to use this platform. Move to a .com, as no other TLD sounds valid. Combine “threads” with “microblogs” and combine “upvotes” with “boosts”. Dramatically simplify the UI. There should not be two different “Settings”.

It seems clear that kbin is currently the defacto reddit replacement, but I don’t think it’ll succeed well until it drops this federation complexity, and focuses on building a simple, scalable website.