• 2 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: September 17th, 2026

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  • I am not a troll, I have put my money where my mouth is and hosted my own forum nightash.net, of which I crossposted the article here.

    You’re treating federation like it creates fresh users, but it doesn’t. It lets existing users move between communities; it doesn’t guarantee new people will find or join them. Centralized forums can have user turnover too, through visibility and a larger audience.

    And the aquarium analogy cuts both ways: if defederation closes the flow between communities, then the ‘oxygen’ isn’t reaching everyone anyway. Calling it a last resort doesn’t change that users on either side can lose access to each other, or that they can’t take their account with them. That’s still fragmentation, just with a nicer plumbing metaphor













  • It isn’t a rare example. That “one example” (which isn’t even accurate) represents one example too many, first of all. Look at the contribution history yourself: you’ll find many cases where changes broke things because the affected code was 7–10 years old.

    There’s a reason Windows maintains near-total backward compatibility: a ten-year-old line of code may still be performing essential work, and there’s no inherent need to remove it. Your standards for what qualifies as acceptable deprecation are subjective, but the broader world expects software to maintain compatibility for decades.