cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5038153
The All-Feed is very important to increase the content-quality of the threadiverse and therefore, ensure its existense. However, for smaller instances, there is only limited reason to put the All-Feed prominent in their UI, because their posts will never be present there. However, if they push people toward their the Local-Feed (which they currently do), people will only stay on their instance and overall discussion quality declines.
So, to truly overcome instance protectionism, we need a new feed, in which an instance can find a good balance between showing content from other instances and its own.
I disagree that discussion quality declines by having mostly local participants. In fact it rather increases if you don’t have a constant stream of low effort drive-by shit posts.
A bit of friction for people to see communities and subscribe to them is not necessarily bad as it makes it more likely that only people actively interested in the topics discussed participate.
Of course a balance needs to be found between this and convenient cross-instance discovery for people actually interested.