Fair enough. I always assumed downvotes were used to weed out/shadow-ban troll accounts more than suppress unpopular opinions but I've never seen that measure reduce the number of trolls in the long run

Can you think of alternatives to voting, though? Sorting always requires some curating system that isn't random but I can't think of any that would be robust to group consensus

I can imagine small communities spread across. By virtue of its size, there are high chances of topics staying relevant too.

I am concerned about small bubbles though. Discussions in single instances that never bounce across to similar communities in other instances but I suppose that's putting the cart before the horse

I am also just trying to dip into Open source projects. I googled around and stumbled upon this. Maybe this might help you get started.

All the best!

I hadn't considered the idea of small communities at all. It would be quite interesting to see how far this develops. Thanks for taking the time to respond

How is community engagement better in a interconnected forum compared to a single forum consisting of all the participants? I'm asking out of ignorance

How would cross community discussions take place?