I am on feddit.de and without federation this server would be much different.

By losing federation with lemmy.ml, Sopuli would lose a lot.

Ooh yeah I would lose a lot, I am active both on Lemmy and Lemmygrad.

I’ll lose a lot if my home instance stops federating since most of the communities I’ve subscribed to are federated.

Even though I don’t often browse other instances (though I sometimes do so), I feel like lemmy.ml would lose a lot since some of the most active users are from other instances.

No but it’s a failsafe if Lemmy.ml pulls a Reddit

I think this instance on a whole would be fine, but I would miss Manders and Feddit communities. Those are the two main instances that I lurk around besides lemmy.ml itself.

I wish there was a way to easily transfer accounts between instances (nomadic identity), so that federation could really shine (as it definitely benefits smaller instances), but I am also sometimes annoyed by the low effort drive-by comments that federation enables.

Of course it does, federation is the one reason I can have a Lemmy experience from this #Friendica instance !

Not really. I like federation in general, but Lemmy would honestly be just as useful and a lot simpler if it was regular self-hostable forum/link aggregator software.

However, I imagine most of the donors and extra attention Lemmy has gotten have to do with the fact that it’s federated.

I wouldn’t use lemmy if it wasn’t federated…

Phpbb already exists and has been far more stable for far longer. Federation is the only thing really justifying Lemmy as a separate project from traditional forum software.

Given, I think it could use more easy/immediate moderating tools in the UI (like mastodon) and more robust personal blocks for users. But I get the feeling this post is secretly trying to address the lemmy vs. lemmygrad political split.

Tbh, I don’t think Lemmy.ml’s site culture is capable of growth. The tech users are here because of the novelty, but beyond that they don’t comment much and seem to use the site as a glorified RSS feed (note how, pre Gen Zedong migration, the only posts with more than a half-dozen comments were about Lemmy software updates). They don’t really add any value that you can’t get on reddit or hackernews.

Longform forum posts aren’t super useful to anarchists, who tend to aggregate on mastodon for a reason. Short, visual, personalized, and curated content speaks more to modern anarchist norms and values. They don’t like people telling them to “read theory” and will make fun of your 5000 word wall of text screed. Snappy, information dense toots that grab your attention in the first 5 words get boosted pretty quickly. However, traditional-format posts on !anarchism@lemmy.ml only get 3-6 upvotes and maybe 2 comments a best. (And before any of y’all complain, prove me wrong by engaging with each other).

Lemmy site culture was pretty much in decay before GenZedong got here, and it breathed new life into the medium (even just through inspiring people to complain about lemmygrad, which has increased engagement dramatically). The longpost format is quite perfect for marxist usage and I’m interested to see if lemmygrad can get a network of socialist sites going. Seeing this much communism on the TL has been my dream for this place for the past couple years.

I think for me lemmy.ml is enough. Turning off federation would have the added benefit of stopping the crazies from coming on here