That is indeed true. Only issue I can see is the copycat community might not outgrow the older community. And I think people tend to gravitate towards the larger community if there are multiples of them.

Thankfully the Fediverse designates community size by active users per week/month/etc when you look them up. Piefed specifically does this. You can't even see the overall subscribers in the community browser. So this levels the playing field somewhat.

In this situation I specifically mean instances designed for other people to use. Not private-use instances like yours. Although if your instance (ie: you) behaved badly enough, and notably so - you'd just end up getting defederated.

I mean the presence itself likely keeps moderators more honest that they might be on reddit. That isn't to say the modlog is designed perfectly (it isn't). But it's far better than what Reddit has (nothing).

Yes, that is the benefit of federation, but the downside is that if a user is forcibly removed from participation in a community they liked, it won’t really matter that they created a new one if they can’t tell the users in the old community to migrate.

Well this is true - on an individual user level. But I am talking about a situation where a mod team (or even just 1 moderator) is so bad, so hated that enough of the userbase for that community get fed up - they could just make their own and use tools like !newcommunities@lemmy.world or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to advertise what they're doing (this does work).

Obviously if it's just you aggrieved with how a community is run, you'll find it much harder. But that's true anywhere.

Speaking as a moderator (even though I don’t really do much on a low traffic community), if a mod bans specific users because they don’t like those users, that’s an abuse of power. But that abuse of power will largely go unchecked because it isn’t big enough of a problem for most users to take issue with, usually.

Oh absolutely, and it's not realistic to expect administrators of medium to high level instances to micro-manage and oversee all moderator decisions within their instance. But I imagine if you lost the plot on your !cars@lemmy.world community and started banning people for frivolous infractions, you'd be credibly replaced by a competing community in relative short-order and I would imagine its more likely that the lemmy admins would remove you eventually.

But on Reddit it’s just as easy to make your own new sub with a different name.

Depends on the subreddit. Many topics have what would be-called natural names that people naturally look for. Suppose you don't like how r/television is ran. What are you gunna do? Make your own? What you gunna call it? r/tv-shows? Maybe (but that's also already taken). r/television2? r/bettertelevision?

Also, how are you gunna effectively advertise it? Reddit is way too big for a new small communtiy in most cases, unless it directly sources from another large community.

You see the uphill problem here?

In both cases you still have the same problem

I think for lemmy, or fediverse in general the biggest benefit is for people who owns their own instance. if let say i (from my own instance) post into some other lemmy art instance and the same thing as reddit r/art happened there and i got banned and a mod removed all my posts there. in the case of r/art and Hayden Clay, Hayden would have lost ALL his previous posts, without the ability to get it back. Even his previously wildly popular posts are nuked, along with his other portfolio. but for lemmy solo instance owners, yes the posts are removed from the community where they were banned from, but on their own instance it's still there along with all the history, if you go back to your instance you can still get the post. From there you can just move on to other community. If a user asked for your portfolio you can just give a link back to those previous post at the very least.

There's a elite few mods on Reddit with power over 500 subs. That can't happen here.

kinda like if I would point out people shouldn’t engage with you since you’re an aggressive troll.

Just leaving this here. I'll let others decide which of the two of us is the aggressive troll based on it. Your actions speak for themselves. I disagreed with you and you keep harassing me over it.

https://programming.dev/comment/20822528