The current default “Homepage” value is “All”. That makes sense for users with zero subscribed magazines, so they see something.
But for users with one or more subscribed magazines, the default value for “Homepage” needs to be “Subscriptions”.
That’s partially just because subscriptions mean little if the default frontpage ignores them. But there’s a more important reason than that.
The current situation is that posts in m/Conservative are heavily downvoted, and barely upvoted. (Whatever your politics may be, consider if this was happening to you.) As more ex-redditors join, this problem is likely to worsen.
Eventually moderators need better controls, to say things like “Only members can vote”, etc.
But for now, a very easy fix is to change the default value of “Homepage” to be “Subscriptions”. Of course, “All” should still be a selectable option for those who prefer it.
Honestly I think it is. Much as the underlying architecture expects federation, each instance competes in a market of commoditized goods, which leads to coalescence. So if the fediverse thrives at all, it will be with one giant instance. Perhaps there’ll always be a few other tiny instances for nerds (I use the word lovingly) who value that sort of thing, but normal people don’t understand the concept of an “instance”, and just want to show up at a .com to feast on data.
At any rate, even if you’re right about federation, any social media service should seek to accommodate a wide diversity of ideas, opinions, and perspectives.
They don’t really need to understand the concepts of an instance within the federation system because ultimately you join whatever instance you want and search and then you can subscribe to anything you want it doesn’t matter whether it’s a one entire instance or one tiny instance in the federation.
There are already many observable instances (pardon the pun) of confusion, even among us early adopters. Time will tell if you’re right or if I am.