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.
That’s my whole argument, if Lemmy is going to be naturally fragmented and require a new account for every defederated instance, why not just use regular forums at that point?
You don’t need an account for every defederated instance. The network is still one and whole. Defederation only hides the two instances’ activities from each other’s users, but you can use piefed.zip that doesn’t defederate from basically anything.
You will see all content defederated from lemmy.world and you will also see all content from lemmy.world.
If you use piefed.zip, you will get precisely the result you are describing you want. You will have all the Forumverse content behind one login, seamlessly.
This one is easy, because regular forums are even more fragmented. Are you really one of those “all or nothing” people?
If you are in a regular forum you also don’t get access to any of the lemmy communities, so what’s your point?