I’ve been thinking about the issue of less-thoughtful discussions from large numbers of users. I think the phenomenon is inevitable. I also think community topics being duplicated across the federation will help with this.

Let’s take technology for example. So [email protected] might end up as the most reddit-front-page feeling, with [email protected] a little less comment-memey, then smaller instances having progressively smaller communities that better reflect the focus of the instance’s overall slant.

The best analogy for communities and instances might be newspapers or TV channels. You’re going to get a sports section on CBS, NBC, WaPo, whatever. They will largely publish the same stories, but with very slightly different feels. As you get into smaller publications, like say the regional publication from your state’s sportshub city, they will tailor to the interests of that particular area.

As users, we not only get to choose how broad the interests of the communities we subscribe to but we also get to subscribe to communities that are redundant (for lack of better word) so that we can stay in touch with very broad looks across an interest while having more focused and perhaps higher-quality discussions at the same time.