The purpose of sites like this is for people to discuss the content.

I might try that. Federated commenting would be incredibly useful. Unless you already have a popular blog there’s not a lot of reason for anyone to make an account just to comment.

I recently installed a Mastodon site as a pro-gun social network. I’ll probably be adding Lemmy and Friendica as part of an ecosystem for people who are pro gun but also for people who might fall into the category of “progressive Republican” or “social libertarian” so that we can have an alternate social network that isn’t filled with alt-right dipshits. Ruqqus is currently having a far-right struggle session because several of their equivalent of subreddits got banned.

I agree. The only issue I really disagree on is that he doesn’t want to add groups to Mastodon which is a pretty important feature of social networking sites.

Federation is critical to the development of alternative social networks. The reason people use specific social networks is because other people are on them. If there’s an open source social network app that isn’t federated, then everyone using sites powered by that app is isolated. With federation, all instances of the social network can interact with each other. Different instances can pop in and out of existence and the ones that stick around can become popular.

It’s better for new social networks to be federated then isolated.