I agree with this, but in open source there’s an extra layer of complexity: the “I don’t care about market share” dev attitude that’s sometimes admirable and sometimes frustrating.

Agreed, it’s such a poor summary of the article that I can’t tell if it’s an intentional strawman argument.

Be so bold.

Sorry, that was the best link I could find at that moment. Since the word “ubuntu” means something like “humanity towards others,” Canonical really leaned into that concept with their tagline “Linux for human beings” in the early days. This involved shipping some controversial wallpaper images and using less risque shots from the same photo shoot on things like the CD-ROM cover.

Ubuntu used to be naked people!

Microsoft’s Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems are PCMag Editors’ Choice picks

lol

All four of the replies to your comment (as of now) are from users on different instances.

IBM VoiceType Simply Speaking Gold

I’ve got a dorkier story: I asked for speech dictation software.

I think where we differ is whether Lemmy is pointless without truly distributed communities. I come down on the side of “it’s not pointless” since there’s a huge and growing install-base of mostly* compatible servers, clients and users that means the cost of switching communities is low, and the threat of switching may be enough to keep mods from implementing unpopular policies. More worrying to me is the admin of your home instance, where your identity is located, going rogue, getting hit by a bus, forgetting to pay their hosting bill, etc.

*notwithstanding serious issues like defederation

Silently combining communities, which may each have different content policies, is rife with potential for user confusion. Also, there’s no guarantee that communities with the same name across servers have the same aims — to use your “piracy” example, c/piracy on one instance may be enthusiasts of literally sailing the seas wearing peg-legs and looting ships, or people who have sarcastically adopted the name for their fandom of those Johnny Depp movies, or something else entirely. Or your desired kind of piracy may take place in communities named differently across servers, whether it’s due to someone else registering the community name first, local slang/translation, etc. Ironically, I think what you’re asking for is a different type of centralization — centralization of namespace across servers.

The suggestion is interesting, but you may be expecting something out of Lemmy that it is not, as communities are individually hosted and managed. It does sound like there may be potential for Lemmy instances or client apps to allow a user to combine communities, multireddit-style, for their own personal usage. That would be cool and useful.