Apologies for any typos or bad formatting, I ran up against the 5000 character limit, and tried to edit down - and the ‘more’ popup actually pops under the next comment in my browser. I’m sure I could fix it somehow, but I believe everything is still intelligible.

No worries, it’s intelligble, and I get it as I got hit by the same thing.

I disagree with your latter point.

Okay, but I don’t think you’ve adaquately explained why.

kbin.social has hit a reasonable mass of users to have a strong local community and become a platform unto itself, running on kbin software.

But it can also join with older, more established communities on lemmy instances like lemmy.world and the two can share content with each other. From a kbin.social account I can fully participate on lemmy.world bar two exceptions (owning a lemmy.world magazine and being a lemmy.world admin), and the reverse is equally true. Hence why I view lemmy/kbin as essentially a single platform.

In your case, “local” seems to mean central to the server. But why is this an inherently important attribute?

I’m not interested in a smaller community.

Again, the point of federation - the different parts (instances) merge into a single platform and community. Each instance hosts a smaller part of the whole community, instead of needing a megacorp capable of hosting the entire one on a single set of servers. Ideally, seamlessly, but in practice I admit there are still some rough edges to work out (e.g. multimagazine support).

There might be a point here when dealing with magazine fragmentation - but reddit has the same problem to a degree and we can borrow their solution (multireddits/multimagazines) to resolve that issue here as well.

I joined Reddit because it was the largest single-site community on the Web. I want the monolithic community, and I accept the costs that incurs, including ads or ad-first design.

Yes, but why? This is the part that is yet to be explained. I think the dangers of single-site centralization have already been demonstrated (e.g. loss of 3rd party apps, mods losing their subs when protesting, folks getting permabans for no apparent reason or for obviously incorrect reasons, etc.)

I don’t care about the difference between Mastodo, kbin, & Lemmy. They’re web software which are trying to replace a monolith, and have seen imited success.

Following this to the extreme, you shouldn’t want to use either twitter or reddit, because they can’t talk to each other. Right? (Okay, single sign on is possible, but after that you still have to interact with their websites and apps separately.)

The fediverse lacks the first mover advantage of being born in the ninties or early aughts and also lacks big megacorp backing, but it has seen bigger growth than single site replacements like Squabbles or Tildes, and I suspect federation is a big driver of the difference there.

Right now, the fediverse is just fragments at the foot of the tower of Babel, each speaking a separate tongue, even if some are intelligible to others.

Except that they all speak the same language (ActivityPub) and differ from big monoliths like twitter and reddit that can’t talk to anyone else. So from an intelligibility perspective they are a step up.

I don’t care about political leanings. I’m talking about a UX issue. If you want to defed from a site, and receive no more content, then so be it, that’s the right of an Admin.

Seconded.