I think federation and decentralization work well for email and text-messaging platforms like XMPP and Matrix because those platforms inherently benefit from being decentralized. They work almost seamlessly with federation.
Forums, on the other hand, don’t really need a federated system. Just look at Lemmy and how many communities defederate from one another because of ideological disagreements. When there’s that much defederation, the entire concept starts to feel pointless. Suddenly, you can’t use your account across “Lemmy” because several instances have decided they don’t like each other anymore.
If this much fragmentation is going to happen naturally, how is federation supposed to be the sustainable future of forums?
I think this is a fair criticism of federated forums. You don’t see this same level of fragmentation with email or text messaging.
Centralized but well-moderated forums are what really matter. Federation doesn’t protect good or useful speech, quality moderation does. And by its nature, Lemmy lacks that.
I imagine what the other commenter meant was that your post would have been 10x better just by removing the “You are a moron” sentence from the beginning.
Yes, in a perfect world, arguments should be all that matter. But on the other end of the little text replies here is (presumably) a real human being, and sometimes your argument doesn’t get across as well if you sandwich it with insults.