panoptic

At one point he posted a response that started with “A:” before editing it to drop the A:
which made it clear he was posting canned answers at the very least

If I’m reading the protocol right, it’s probably larger instances that will avoid more duplication, since:

1. There’s a higher chance they’re going to have more communities shared among users (for really tiny instances you’re probably going to get a lot of overlap since those people likely have interconnected interests, but I expect that would fall off quickly, but then converge at scale).
2. The larger number of users will mean they ‘use’ more of the content they’re pulling down (I can’t read all of a highly active community in a day, but 1000 people together checking through the day might ‘use’ it all).

I’m not sure I see where you see caching fitting in.
I am surprised I don’t see some kind of lower resolution digest concept in the protocol (which might be what you’re looking for)

I wonder how that’ll play out in this federated model. Many of these problems sound like general problems with being a mod (honestly it sounds horrible) rather than uniquely Reddit.

The federated approach will shrink communities for a time but I worry that there’ll be a sharp recentralization as instances stop federating with anything below some size to avoid a wave of spam/junk (similar to the problems small mail servers see).

But I’m new to this model so maybe there’s a reason it won’t play out that way

That’s what they’re saying.

Essentially - if someone from the small instance subscribes to a community that has a ton of data (huge post volume, images, whatever), the small instance needs to pull data over from the larger instance. At some point there may be communities that are so large small instances can’t pull them in without tanking.

Hey, we’ll always have narwals baconing at midnight

No idea - but I actually think the Fediverse concept maps to Reddit way better than it has other social networks so I could see some iteration of this really catching on over time.

For something like Twitter, the whole value proposition is “one big universal conversation” and the federated stuff gets in the way of that a little bit, but Reddit has always been a federation of communities (who occasionally fight, join together, cross post, etc) - that maps really well to this stuff.